In
many references parts one and three are combined under the title Lost
Illusions and A Distinguished Provincial at Paris is given its
individual title. Following this trilogy is a sequel, Scenes from a
Courtesan's Life, which is set directly following the end of Eve and
David.

INTRODUCTION

The longest, without exception, of
Balzac's books, and one which contains hardly any passage that is not
very nearly of his best, _Illusions Perdues_ suffers, I think, a little
in point of composition from the mixture of the Angouleme scenes of its
first and third parts with the purely Parisian interest of _Un Grand
Homme de Province_. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the gain in
distinctness and lucidity of arrangement derived from putting _Les Deux
Poetes_ and _Eve et David_ (a much better title than that which has
been preferred in the _Edition Definitive_) together in one volume, and
reserving the greatness and decadence of Lucien de Rubempre for
another. It is distinctly awkward that this should be divided, as it is
itself an enormous episode, a sort of Herodotean parenthesis, rather
than an integral part of the story. And, as a matter of fact, it joins
on much more to the _Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes_ than to its
actual companions. In fact, it is an instance of the somewhat haphazard
and arbitrary way in which the actual division of the _Comedie_ has
worked, that it should, dealing as it does wholly and solely with
Parisian life, be put in the _Scenes de la Vie de Province_, and should
be separated from its natural conclusion not merely as a matter of
volumes, but as a matter of divisions. In making the arrangement,
however, it is necessary to remember Balzac's own scheme, especially as
the connection of the three parts in other ways is too close to permit
the wrenching of them asunder altogether and finally. This caution
given, all that is necessary can be done by devoting the first part of
the introduction entirely to the first and third or Angouleme parts,
and by consecrating the latter part to the egregious Lucien by himself.

There
is a double gain in doing this, for, independently of the connection as
above referred to, Lucien has little to do except as an opportunity for
the display of virtue by his sister and David Sechard; and the parts in
which they appear are among the most interesting of Balzac's work. The
"Idyllic" charm of this marriage for love, combined as it is with
exhibitions of the author's power in more than one of the ways in which
he loved best to show it, has never escaped attention from Balzac's
most competent critics. He himself had speculated in print and paper
before David Sechard was conceived; he himself had for all "maniacs,"
all men of one idea, the fraternal enthusiasm of a fellow-victim. He
could never touch a miser without a sort of shudder of interest; and
that singular fancy of his for describing complicated legal and
commercial undertakings came in too. Nor did he spare, in this
wide-ranging book, to bring in other favorite matters of his, the
_hobereau_--or squireen--aristocracy, the tittle-tattle of the country
town and so forth.

The result is a book of multifarious
interest, not hampered, as some of its fellows are, by an uncertainty
on the author's part as to what particular hare he is coursing. Part of
the interest, after the description of the printing office and of old
Sechard's swindling of his son, is a doubling, it is true, upon that of
_La muse du Departement_, and is perhaps a little less amusingly done;
but it is blended with better matters. Sixte du Chatelet is a
considerable addition to Balzac's gallery of the aristocracy in
transition--of the Bonaparte _parvenus_ whom perhaps he understood even
better than the old nobility, for they were already in his time
becoming adulterated and alloyed; or than the new folk of business and
finance, for they were but in their earliest stages. Nor is the rest of
the society of Madame de Bargeton inferior.

But the real
interest both of _Les Deux Poetes_, and still more of _Eve et David_,
between which two, be it always remembered, comes in the _Distinguished
Provincial_, lies in the characters who gave their name to the last
part. In David, the man of one idea, who yet has room for an honest
love and an all-deserved friendship, Balzac could not go wrong. David
Sechard takes a place by himself among the sheep of the _Comedie_. Some
may indeed say that this phrase is unfortunate, that Balzac's sheep
have more qualities of the mutton than innocence. It is not quite to be
denied. But David is very far indeed from being a good imbecile, like
Cesar Birotteau, or a man intoxicated out of common-sense by a passion
respectable in itself, like Goriot. His sacrifice of his mania in time
is something--nay, it is very much; and his disinterested devotion to
his brother-in-law does not quite pass the limits of sense.

But
what shall we say of Eve? She is good of course, good as gold, as
Eugenie Grandet herself; and the novelist has been kind enough to allow
her to be happier. But has he quite interested us in her love for
David? Has he even persuaded us that the love existed in a form
deserving the name? Did not Eve rather take her husband to protect him,
to look after him, than either to love, honor, and obey in the orthodox
sense, or to love for love's sake only, as some still take their
husbands and wives even at the end of the nineteenth century? This is a
question which each reader must answer for himself; but few are likely
to refuse assent to the sentence, "Happy the husband who has such a
wife as Eve Chardon!"

The central part of _Illusions Perdues_,
which in reason stands by itself, and may do so ostensibly with
considerably less than the introduction explanatory which Balzac often
gives to his own books, is one of the most carefully worked out and
diversely important of his novels. It should, of course, be read before
_Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes_, which is avowedly its second
part, a small piece of _Eve et David_ serving as the link between them.
But it is almost sufficient by and to itself. _Lucien de Rubempre ou le
Journalisme_ would be the most straightforward and descriptive title
for it, and one which Balzac in some of his moods would have been
content enough to use.

The story of it is too continuous and
interesting to need elaborate argument, for nobody is likely to miss
any important link in it. But Balzac has nowhere excelled in finesse
and success of analysis, the double disillusion which introduces itself
at once between Madame de Bargeton and Lucien, and which makes any
_redintegratio amoris_ of a valid kind impossible, because each cannot
but be aware that the other has anticipated the rupture. It will not,
perhaps, be a matter of such general agreement whether he has or has
not exceeded the fair license of the novelist in attributing to Lucien
those charms of body and gifts of mind which make him, till his moral
weakness and worthlessness are exposed, irresistible, and enable him
for a time to repair his faults by a sort of fairy good-luck. The
sonnets of _Les Marguerites_, which were given to the author by
poetical friends --Gautier, it is said, supplied the "Tulip"--are
undoubtedly good and sufficient. But Lucien's first article, which is
(according to a practice the rashness of which cannot be too much
deprecated) given likewise, is certainly not very wonderful; and the
Paris press must have been rather at a low ebb if it made any
sensation. As we are not favored with any actual portrait of Lucien,
detection is less possible here, but the novelist has perhaps a very
little abused the privilege of making a hero, "Like Paris handsome, and
like Hector brave," or rather "Like Paris handsome, and like Phoebus
clever." There is no doubt, however, that the interest of the book lies
partly in the vivid and severe picture of journalism given in it, and
partly in the way in which the character of Lucien is adjusted to show
up that of the abstract journalist still farther.

How far is the
picture true? It must be said, in fairness to Balzac, that a good many
persons of some competence in France have pronounced for its truth
there; and if that be so, all one can say is, "So much the worse for
French journalists." It is also certain that a lesser, but still not
inconsiderable number of persons in England--generally persons who, not
perhaps with Balzac's genius, have like Balzac published books, and are
not satisfied with their reception by the press--agree more or less as
to England. For myself, I can only say that I do not believe things
have ever been quite so bad in England, and that I am quite sure there
never has been any need for them to be. There are, no doubt, spiteful,
unprincipled, incompetent practitioners of journalism as of everything
else; and it is of course obvious that while advertisements, the favor
of the chiefs of parties, and so forth, are temptations to newspaper
managers not to hold up a very high standard of honor, anonymity
affords to newspaper writers a dangerously easy shield to cover malice
or dishonesty. But I can only say that during long practice in every
kind of political and literary journalism, I never was seriously asked
to write anything I did not think, and never had the slightest
difficulty in confining myself to what I did think.

In fact
Balzac, like a good many other men of letters who abuse journalism, put
himself very much out of court by continually practising it, not merely
during his struggling period, but long after he had made his name,
indeed almost to the very last. And it is very hard to resist the
conclusion that when he charged journalism generally not merely with
envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, but with hopeless and
pervading dishonesty, he had little more ground for it than an
inability to conceive how any one, except from vile reasons of this
kind, could fail to praise Honore de Balzac.

At any rate, either
his art by itself, or his art assisted and strengthened by that
personal feeling which, as we have seen counted for much with him, has
here produced a wonderfully vivid piece of fiction--one, I think,
inferior in success to hardly anything he has done. Whether, as at a
late period a very well-informed, well-affected, and well-equipped
critic hinted, his picture of the Luciens and the Lousteaus did not a
little to propagate both is another matter. The seriousness with which
Balzac took the accusation perhaps shows a little sense of galling. But
putting this aside, _Un Grand Homme de Province a Paris_ must be
ranked, both for comedy and tragedy, both for scheme and execution, in
the first rank of his work.

The bibliography of this long and
curious book--almost the only one which contains some verse, some of
Balzac's own, some given to him by his more poetical friends--occupies
full ten pages of M. de Lovenjoul's record. The first part, which bore
the general title, was a book from the beginning, and appeared in 1837
in the _Scenes de la Vie de Province_. It had five chapters, and the
original verse it contained had appeared in the _Annalaes Romantiques_
ten years earlier with slight variants. The second part, _Un Grand
Homme de Province_, likewise appeared as a book, independently
published by Souverain in 1839 in two volumes and forty chapters. But
two of these chapters had been inserted a few days before the
publications in the _Estafette_. Here Canalis was more distinctly
identified with Lamartine than in the subsequent texts. The third part,
unlike its forerunners, appeared serially in two papers, _L'Etat_ and
_Le Parisien_, in the year 1843, under the title of _David Sechard, ou
les Souffrances d'un Inventeur_, and next year became a book under the
first title only. But before this last issue it had been united to the
other two parts, and had appeared as _Eve et David_ in the first
edition of the _Comedie.

George Saintsbury

I

TWO POETS (Lost Illusions Part I)

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Ellen Marriage

DEDICATION

To Monsieur Victor Hugo,

It was your birthright to be, like a Rafael or a Pitt, a great poet at
an age when other men are children; it was your fate, the fate of
Chateaubriand and of every man of genius, to struggle against jealousy
skulking behind the columns of a newspaper, or crouching in the
subterranean places of journalism. For this reason I desired that your
victorious name should help to win a victory for this work that I
inscribe to you, a work which, if some persons are to be believed, is
an act of courage as well as a veracious history. If there had been
journalists in the time of Moliere, who can doubt but that they, like
marquises, financiers, doctors, and lawyers, would have been within the
province of the writer of plays? And why should Comedy, _qui castigat
ridendo mores_, make an exception in favor of one power, when the
Parisian press spares none? I am happy, monsieur, in this opportunity
of subscribing myself your sincere admirer and friend,

DE BALZAC.

TWO POETS

At
the time when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the
ink-distributing roller were not as yet in general use in small
provincial printing establishments. Even at Angouleme, so closely
connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris,
the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which
the language owes a figure of speech--"the press groans" was no mere
rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls were still used
in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand
on the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type was
placed in readiness for the sheet of paper, being made of marble,
literally deserved its name of "impression-stone." Modern machinery has
swept all this old-world mechanism into oblivion; the wooden press
which, with all its imperfections, turned out such beautiful work for
the Elzevirs, Plantin, Aldus, and Didot is so completely forgotten,
that something must be said as to the obsolete gear on which
Jerome-Nicolas Sechard set an almost superstitious affection, for it
plays a part in this chronicle of great small things.

Sechard
had been in his time a journeyman pressman, a "bear" in compositors'
slang. The continued pacing to and fro of the pressman from ink-table
to press, from press to ink-table, no doubt suggested the nickname. The
"bears," however, make matters even by calling the compositors monkeys,
on account of the nimble industry displayed by those gentlemen in
picking out the type from the hundred and fifty-two compartments of the
cases.

In the disastrous year 1793, Sechard, being fifty years
old and a married man, escaped the great Requisition which swept the
bulk of French workmen into the army. The old pressman was the only
hand left in the printing-house; and when the master (otherwise the
"gaffer") died, leaving a widow, but no children, the business seemed
to be on the verge of extinction; for the solitary "bear" was quite
incapable of the feat of transformation into a "monkey," and in his
quality of pressman had never learned to read or write. Just then,
however, a Representative of the People being in a mighty hurry to
publish the Decrees of the Convention, bestowed a master printer's
license on Sechard, and requisitioned the establishment. Citizen
Sechard accepted the dangerous patent, bought the business of his
master's widow with his wife's savings, and took over the plant at half
its value. But he was not even at the beginning. He was bound to print
the Decrees of the Republic without mistakes and without delay.

In
this strait Jerome-Nicolas Sechard had the luck to discover a noble
Marseillais who had no mind to emigrate and lose his lands, nor yet to
show himself openly and lose his head, and consequently was fain to
earn a living by some lawful industry. A bargain was struck. M. le
Comte de Maucombe, disguised in a provincial printer's jacket, set up,
read, and corrected the decrees which forbade citizens to harbor
aristocrats under pain of death; while the "bear," now a "gaffer,"
printed the copies and duly posted them, and the pair remained safe and
sound.

In 1795, when the squall of the Terror had passed over,
Nicolas Sechard was obliged to look out for another jack-of-all-trades
to be compositor, reader, and foreman in one; and an Abbe who declined
the oath succeeded the Comte de Maucombe as soon as the First Consul
restored public worship. The Abbe became a Bishop at the Restoration,
and in after days the Count and the Abbe met and sat together on the
same bench of the House of Peers.

In 1795 Jerome-Nicolas had not
known how to read or write; in 1802 he had made no progress in either
art; but by allowing a handsome margin for "wear and tear" in his
estimates, he managed to pay a foreman's wages. The once easy-going
journeyman was a terror to his "bears" and "monkeys." Where poverty
ceases, avarice begins. From the day when Sechard first caught a
glimpse of the possibility of making a fortune, a growing covetousness
developed and sharpened in him a certain practical faculty for
business--greedy, suspicious, and keen-eyed. He carried on his craft in
disdain of theory. In course of time he had learned to estimate at a
glance the cost of printing per page or per sheet in every kind of
type. He proved to unlettered customers that large type costs more to
move; or, if small type was under discussion, that it was more
difficult to handle. The setting-up of the type was the one part of his
craft of which he knew nothing; and so great was his terror lest he
should not charge enough, that he always made a heavy profit. He never
took his eyes off his compositors while they were paid by the hour. If
he knew that a paper manufacturer was in difficulties, he would buy up
his stock at a cheap rate and warehouse the paper. So from this time
forward he was his own landlord, and owned the old house which had been
a printing office from time immemorial.

He had every sort of
luck. He was left a widower with but one son. The boy he sent to the
grammar school; he must be educated, not so much for his own sake as to
train a successor to the business; and Sechard treated the lad harshly
so as to prolong the time of parental rule, making him work at case on
holidays, telling him that he must learn to earn his own living, so as
to recompense his poor old father, who was slaving his life out to give
him an education.

Then the Abbe went, and Sechard promoted one
of his four compositors to be foreman, making his choice on the future
bishop's recommendation of the man as an honest and intelligent
workman. In these ways the worthy printer thought to tide over the time
until his son could take a business which was sure to extend in young
and clever hands.

David Sechard's school career was a brilliant
one. Old Sechard, as a "bear" who had succeeded in life without any
education, entertained a very considerable contempt for attainments in
book learning; and when he sent his son to Paris to study the higher
branches of typography, he recommended the lad so earnestly to save a
good round sum in the "working man's paradise" (as he was pleased to
call the city), and so distinctly gave the boy to understand that he
was not to draw upon the paternal purse, that it seemed as if old
Sechard saw some way of gaining private ends of his own by that sojourn
in the Land of Sapience. So David learned his trade, and completed his
education at the same time, and Didot's foreman became a scholar; and
yet when he left Paris at the end of 1819, summoned home by his father
to take the helm of business, he had not cost his parent a farthing.

Now
Nicolas Sechard's establishment hitherto had enjoyed a monopoly of all
the official printing in the department, besides the work of the
prefecture and the diocese--three connections which should prove mighty
profitable to an active young printer; but precisely at this juncture
the firm of Cointet Brothers, paper manufacturers, applied to the
authorities for the second printer's license in Angouleme. Hitherto old
Sechard had contrived to reduce this license to a dead letter, thanks
to the war crisis of the Empire, and consequent atrophy of commercial
enterprise; but he had neglected to buy up the right himself, and this
piece of parsimony was the ruin of the old business. Sechard thought
joyfully when he heard the news that the coming struggle with the
Cointets would be fought out by his son and not by himself.

"I should have gone to the wall," he thought, "but a young fellow from
the Didots will pull through."

The
septuagenarian sighed for the time when he could live at ease in his
own fashion. If his knowledge of the higher branches of the craft of
printing was scanty, on the other hand, he was supposed to be past
master of an art which workmen pleasantly call "tipple-ography," an art
held in high esteem by the divine author of _Pantagruel_; though of
late, by reason of the persecution of societies yclept of Temperance,
the cult has fallen, day by day, into disuse.

Jerome-Nicolas
Sechard, bound by the laws of etymology to be a dry subject, suffered
from an inextinguishable thirst. His wife, during her lifetime, managed
to control within reasonable bounds the passion for the juice of the
grape, a taste so natural to the bear that M. de Chateaubriand remarked
it among the ursine tribes of the New World. But philosophers inform us
that old age is apt to revert to the habits of youth, and Sechard
senior is a case in point--the older he grew, the better he loved to
drink. The master-passion had given a stamp of originality to an ursine
physiognomy; his nose had developed till it reached the proportions of
a double great-canon A; his veined cheeks looked like vine-leaves,
covered, as they were, with bloated patches of purple, madder red, and
often mottled hues; till altogether, the countenance suggested a huge
truffle clasped about by autumn vine tendrils. The little gray eyes,
peering out from beneath thick eyebrows like bushes covered with snow,
were agleam with the cunning of avarice that had extinguished
everything else in the man, down to the very instinct of fatherhood.
Those eyes never lost their cunning even when disguised in drink.
Sechard put you in mind of one of La Fontaine's Franciscan friars, with
the fringe of grizzled hair still curling about his bald pate. He was
short and corpulent, like one of the old-fashioned lamps for
illumination, that burn a vast deal of oil to a very small piece of
wick; for excess of any sort confirms the habit of body, and
drunkenness, like much study, makes the fat man stouter, and the lean
man leaner still.

For thirty years Jerome-Nicolas-Sechard had
worn the famous municipal three-cornered hat, which you may still see
here and there on the head of the towncrier in out-of-the-way places.
His breeches and waistcoat were of greenish velveteen, and he wore an
old-fashioned brown greatcoat, gray cotton stockings, and shoes with
silver buckles to them. This costume, in which the workman shone
through the burgess, was so thoroughly in keeping with the man's
character, defects, and way of life, that he might have come ready
dressed into the world. You could no more imagine him apart from his
clothes than you could think of a bulb without its husk. If the old
printer had not long since given the measure of his blind greed, the
very nature of the man came out in the manner of his abdication.

Knowing,
as he did, that his son must have learned his business pretty
thoroughly in the great school of the Didots, he had yet been
ruminating for a long while over the bargain that he meant to drive
with David. All that the father made, the son, of course, was bound to
lose, but in business this worthy knew nothing of father or son. If, in
the first instance, he had looked on David as his only child, later he
came to regard him as the natural purchaser of the business, whose
interests were therefore his own. Sechard meant to sell dear; David, of
course, to buy cheap; his son, therefore, was an antagonist, and it was
his duty to get the better of him. The transformation of sentiment into
self-seeking, ordinarily slow, tortuous, and veiled by hypocrisy in
better educated people, was swift and direct in the old "bear," who
demonstrated the superiority of shrewd tipple-ography over book-learned
typography.

David came home, and the old man received him with
all the cordiality which cunning folk can assume with an eye to
business. He was as full of thought for him as any lover for his
mistress; giving him his arm, telling him where to put his foot down so
as to avoid the mud, warming the bed for him, lighting a fire in his
room, making his supper ready. The next day, after he had done his best
to fluster his son's wits over a sumptuous dinner, Jerome-Nicolas
Sechard, after copious potations, began with a "Now for business," a
remark so singularly misplaced between two hiccoughs, that David begged
his parent to postpone serious matters until the morrow. But the old
"bear" was by no means inclined to put off the long-expected battle; he
was too well prepared to turn his tipsiness to good account. He had
dragged the chain these fifty years, he would not wear it another hour;
to-morrow his son should be the "gaffer."

Perhaps a word or two
about the business premises may be said here. The printing-house had
been established since the reign of Louis XIV. in the angle made by the
Rue de Beaulieu and the Place du Murier; it had been devoted to its
present purposes for a long time past. The ground floor consisted of a
single huge room lighted on the side next the street by an
old-fashioned casement, and by a large sash window that gave upon the
yard at the back. A passage at the side led to the private office; but
in the provinces the processes of typography excite such a lively
interest, that customers usually preferred to enter by way of the glass
door in the street front, though they at once descended three steps,
for the floor of the workshop lay below the level of the street. The
gaping newcomer always failed to note the perils of the passage through
the shop; and while staring at the sheets of paper strung in groves
across the ceiling, ran against the rows of cases, or knocked his hat
against the tie-bars that secured the presses in position. Or the
customer's eyes would follow the agile movements of a compositor,
picking out type from the hundred and fifty-two compartments of his
case, reading his copy, verifying the words in the composing-stick, and
leading the lines, till a ream of damp paper weighted with heavy slabs,
and set down in the middle of the gangway, tripped up the bemused
spectator, or he caught his hip against the angle of a bench, to the
huge delight of boys, "bears," and "monkeys." No wight had ever been
known to reach the further end without accident. A couple of
glass-windowed cages had been built out into the yard at the back; the
foreman sat in state in the one, the master printer in the other. Out
in the yard the walls were agreeably decorated by trellised vines, a
tempting bit of color, considering the owner's reputation. On the one
side of the space stood the kitchen, on the other the woodshed, and in
a ramshackle penthouse against the hall at the back, the paper was
trimmed and damped down. Here, too, the forms, or, in ordinary
language, the masses of set-up type, were washed. Inky streams issuing
thence blended with the ooze from the kitchen sink, and found their way
into the kennel in the street outside; till peasants coming into the
town of a market day believed that the Devil was taking a wash inside
the establishment.

As to the house above the printing office, it
consisted of three rooms on the first floor and a couple of attics in
the roof. The first room did duty as dining-room and lobby; it was
exactly the same length as the passage below, less the space taken up
by the old-fashioned wooden staircase; and was lighted by a narrow
casement on the street and a bull's-eye window looking into the yard.
The chief characteristic of the apartment was a cynic simplicity, due
to money-making greed. The bare walls were covered with plain
whitewash, the dirty brick floor had never been scoured, the furniture
consisted of three rickety chairs, a round table, and a sideboard
stationed between the two doors of a bedroom and a sitting-room.
Windows and doors alike were dingy with accumulated grime. Reams of
blank paper or printed matter usually encumbered the floor, and more
frequently than not the remains of Sechard's dinner, empty bottles and
plates, were lying about on the packages.

The bedroom was
lighted on the side of the yard by a window with leaded panes, and hung
with the old-world tapestry that decorated house fronts in provincial
towns on Corpus Christi Day. For furniture it boasted a vast four-post
bedstead with canopy, valances and quilt of crimson serge, a couple of
worm-eaten armchairs, two tapestry-covered chairs in walnut wood, an
aged bureau, and a timepiece on the mantel-shelf. The Seigneur Rouzeau,
Jerome-Nicolas' master and predecessor, had furnished the homely
old-world room; it was just as he had left it.

The sitting-room
had been partly modernized by the late Mme. Sechard; the walls were
adorned with a wainscot, fearful to behold, painted the color of powder
blue. The panels were decorated with wall-paper --Oriental scenes in
sepia tint--and for all furniture, half-a-dozen chairs with lyre-shaped
backs and blue leather cushions were ranged round the room. The two
clumsy arched windows that gave upon the Place du Murier were
curtainless; there was neither clock nor candle sconce nor mirror above
the mantel-shelf, for Mme. Sechard had died before she carried out her
scheme of decoration; and the "bear," unable to conceive the use of
improvements that brought in no return in money, had left it at this
point.

Hither, _pede titubante_, Jerome-Nicolas Sechard brought
his son, and pointed to a sheet of paper lying on the table--a
valuation of plant drawn up by the foreman under his direction.

"Read
that, my boy," said Jerome-Nicolas, rolling a drunken eye from the
paper to his son, and back to the paper. "You will see what a jewel of
a printing-house I am giving you."

"'Three wooden presses, held in position by iron tie-bars, cast-iron
plates----'"

"An improvement of my own," put in Sechard senior.

"'----Together
with all the implements, ink-tables, balls, benches, et cetera, sixteen
hundred francs!' Why, father," cried David, letting the sheet fall,
"these presses of yours are old sabots not worth a hundred crowns; they
are only fit for firewood."

"Sabots?" cried old Sechard,
"_Sabots_? There, take the inventory and let us go downstairs. You will
soon see whether your paltry iron-work contrivances will work like
these solid old tools, tried and trusty. You will not have the heart
after that to slander honest old presses that go like mail coaches, and
are good to last you your lifetime without needing repairs of any sort.
Sabots! Yes, sabots that are like to hold salt enough to cook your eggs
with--sabots that your father has plodded on with these twenty years;
they have helped him to make you what you are."

The father,
without coming to grief on the way, lurched down the worn, knotty
staircase that shook under his tread. In the passage he opened the door
of the workshop, flew to the nearest press (artfully oiled and cleaned
for the occasion) and pointed out the strong oaken cheeks, polished up
by the apprentice.

"Isn't it a love of a press?"

A
wedding announcement lay in the press. The old "bear" folded down the
frisket upon the tympan, and the tympan upon the form, ran in the
carriage, worked the lever, drew out the carriage, and lifted the
frisket and tympan, all with as much agility as the youngest of the
tribe. The press, handled in this sort, creaked aloud in such fine
style that you might have thought some bird had dashed itself against
the window pane and flown away again.

"Where is the English press that could go at that pace?" the parent
asked of his astonished son.

Old
Sechard hurried to the second, and then to the third in order,
repeating the manoeuvre with equal dexterity. The third presenting to
his wine-troubled eye a patch overlooked by the apprentice, with a
notable oath he rubbed it with the skirt of his overcoat, much as a
horse-dealer polishes the coat of an animal that he is trying to sell.

"With
those three presses, David, you can make your nine thousand francs a
year without a foreman. As your future partner, I am opposed to your
replacing these presses by your cursed cast-iron machinery, that wears
out the type. You in Paris have been making such a to-do over that
damned Englishman's invention--a foreigner, an enemy of France who
wants to help the ironfounders to a fortune. Oh! you wanted Stanhopes,
did you? Thanks for your Stanhopes, that cost two thousand five hundred
francs apiece, about twice as much as my three jewels put together, and
maul your type to pieces, because there is no give in them. I haven't
book-learning like you, but you keep this well in mind, the life of the
Stanhope is the death of the type. Those three presses will serve your
turn well enough, the printing will be properly done, and folk here in
Angouleme won't ask any more of you. You may print with presses made of
wood or iron or gold or silver, _they_ will never pay you a farthing
more."

"'Item,'" pursued David, "'five thousand pounds weight of
type from M. Vaflard's foundry----'" Didot's apprentice could not help
smiling at the name.

"Laugh away! After twelve years of wear,
that type is as good as new. That is what I call a typefounder! M.
Vaflard is an honest man, who uses hard metal; and, to my way of
thinking, the best typefounder is the one you go to most seldom."

"'----Taken
at ten thousand francs,'" continued David. "Ten thousand francs,
father! Why, that is two francs a pound, and the Messrs. Didot only ask
thirty-six sous for their _Cicero_! These nail-heads of yours will only
fetch the price of old metal--fivepence a pound."

"You call M.
Gille's italics, running-hand and round-hand, 'nail-heads,' do you? M.
Gille, that used to be printer to the Emperor! And type that costs six
francs a pound! masterpieces of engraving, bought only five years ago.
Some of them are as bright yet as when they came from the foundry. Look
here!"

Old Sechard pounced upon some packets of unused sorts, and held them
out for David to see.

"I
am not book-learned; I don't know how to read or write; but, all the
same, I know enough to see that M. Gille's sloping letters are the
fathers of your Messrs. Didot's English running-hand. Here is the
round-hand," he went on, taking up an unused pica type.

David
saw that there was no way of coming to terms with his father. It was a
case of Yes or No--of taking or leaving it. The very ropes across the
ceiling had gone down into the old "bear's" inventory, and not the
smallest item was omitted; jobbing chases, wetting-boards, paste-pots,
rinsing-trough, and lye-brushes had all been put down and valued
separately with miserly exactitude. The total amounted to thirty
thousand francs, including the license and the goodwill. David asked
himself whether or not this thing was feasible.

Old Sechard grew
uneasy over his son's silence; he would rather have had stormy argument
than a wordless acceptance of the situation. Chaffering in these sorts
of bargains means that a man can look after his interests. "A man who
is ready to pay you anything you ask will pay nothing," old Sechard was
saying to himself. While he tried to follow his son's train of thought,
he went through the list of odds and ends of plant needed by a country
business, drawing David now to a hot-press, now to a cutting-press,
bragging of its usefulness and sound condition.

"Old tools are
always the best tools," said he. "In our line of business they ought to
fetch more than the new, like goldbeaters' tools."

Hideous
vignettes, representing Hymen and Cupids, skeletons raising the lids of
their tombs to describe a V or an M, and huge borders of masks for
theatrical posters became in turn objects of tremendous value through
old Jerome-Nicolas' vinous eloquence. Old custom, he told his son, was
so deeply rooted in the district that he (David) would only waste his
pains if he gave them the finest things in life. He himself had tried
to sell them a better class of almanac than the _Double Liegeois_ on
grocers' paper; and what came of it?--the original _Double Liegeois_
sold better than the most sumptuous calendars. David would soon see the
importance of these old-fashioned things when he found he could get
more for them than for the most costly new-fangled articles.

"Aha!
my boy, Paris is Paris, and the provinces are the provinces. If a man
came in from L'Houmeau with an order for wedding cards, and you were to
print them without a Cupid and garlands, he would not believe that he
was properly married; you would have them all back again if you sent
them out with a plain M on them after the style of your Messrs. Didot.
They may be fine printers, but their inventions won't take in the
provinces for another hundred years. So there you are."

A
generous man is a bad bargain-driver. David's nature was of the
sensitive and affectionate type that shrinks from a dispute, and gives
way at once if an opponent touches his feelings. His loftiness of
feeling, and the fact that the old toper had himself well in hand, put
him still further at a disadvantage in a dispute about money matters
with his own father, especially as he credited that father with the
best intentions, and took his covetous greed for a printer's attachment
to his old familiar tools. Still, as Jerome-Nicolas Sechard had taken
the whole place over from Rouzeau's widow for ten thousand francs, paid
in assignats, it stood to reason that thirty thousand francs in coin at
the present day was an exorbitant demand.

"Father, you are cutting my throat!" exclaimed David.

"_I_,"
cried the old toper, raising his hand to the lines of cord across the
ceiling, "I who gave you life? Why, David, what do you suppose the
license is worth? Do you know that the sheet of advertisements alone,
at fivepence a line, brought in five hundred francs last month? You
turn up the books, lad, and see what we make by placards and the
registers at the Prefecture, and the work for the mayor's office, and
the bishop too. You are a do-nothing that has no mind to get on. You
are haggling over the horse that will carry you to some pretty bit of
property like Marsac."

Attached to the valuation of plant there
was a deed of partnership between Sechard senior and his son. The good
father was to let his house and premises to the new firm for twelve
hundred francs per annum, reserving one of the two rooms in the roof
for himself. So long as David's purchase-money was not paid in full,
the profits were to be divided equally; as soon as he paid off his
father, he was to be made sole proprietor of the business.

David
made a mental calculation of the value of the license, the goodwill,
and the stock of paper, leaving the plant out of account. It was just
possible, he thought, to clear off the debt. He accepted the
conditions. Old Sechard, accustomed to peasants' haggling, knowing
nothing of the wider business views of Paris, was amazed at such a
prompt conclusion.

"Can he have been putting money by?" he asked himself. "Or is he
scheming out, at this moment, some way of not paying me?"

With
this notion in his head, he tried to find out whether David had any
money with him; he wanted to be paid something on account. The old
man's inquisitiveness roused his son's distrust; David remained close
buttoned up to the chin.

Next day, old Sechard made the
apprentice move all his own household stuff up into the attic until
such time as an empty market cart could take it out on the return
journey into the country; and David entered into possession of three
bare, unfurnished rooms on the day that saw him installed in the
printing-house, without one sou wherewith to pay his men's wages. When
he asked his father, as a partner, to contribute his share towards the
working expenses, the old man pretended not to understand. He had found
the printing-house, he said, and he was not bound to find the money
too. He had paid his share. Pressed close by his son's reasoning, he
answered that when he himself had paid Rouzeau's widow he had not had a
penny left. If he, a poor, ignorant working man, had made his way,
Didot's apprentice should do still better. Besides, had not David been
earning money, thanks to an education paid for by the sweat of his old
father's brow? Now surely was the time when the education would come in
useful.

"What have you done with your 'polls?'" he asked,
returning to the charge. He meant to have light on a problem which his
son left unresolved the day before.

"Why, had I not to live?" David asked indignantly, "and books to buy
besides?"

"Oh!
you bought books, did you? You will make a poor man of business. A man
that buys books is hardly fit to print them," retorted the "bear."

Then
David endured the most painful of humiliations--the sense of shame for
a parent; there was nothing for it but to be passive while his father
poured out a flood of reasons--sordid, whining, contemptible,
money-getting reasons--in which the niggardly old man wrapped his
refusal. David crushed down his pain into the depths of his soul; he
saw that he was alone; saw that he had no one to look to but himself;
saw, too, that his father was trying to make money out of him; and in a
spirit of philosophical curiosity, he tried to find out how far the old
man would go. He called old Sechard's attention to the fact that he had
never as yet made any inquiry as to his mother's fortune; if that
fortune would not buy the printing-house, it might go some ways towards
paying the working expenses.

"Your mother's fortune?" echoed old Sechard; "why, it was her beauty
and intelligence!"

David
understood his father thoroughly after that answer; he understood that
only after an interminable, expensive, and disgraceful lawsuit could he
obtain any account of the money which by rights was his. The noble
heart accepted the heavy burden laid upon it, seeing clearly beforehand
how difficult it would be to free himself from the engagements into
which he had entered with his father.

"I will work," he said to
himself. "After all, if I have a rough time of it, so had the old man;
besides, I shall be working for myself, shall I not?"

"I am leaving you a treasure," said Sechard, uneasy at his son's
silence.

David asked what the treasure might be.

"Marion!" said his father.

Marion,
a big country girl, was an indispensable part of the establishment. It
was Marion who damped the paper and cut it to size; Marion did the
cooking, washing, and marketing; Marion unloaded the paper carts,
collected accounts, and cleaned the ink-balls; and if Marion had but
known how to read, old Sechard would have put her to set up type into
the bargain.

Old Sechard set out on foot for the
country. Delighted as he was with his sale of the business, he was not
quite easy in his mind as to the payment. To the throes of the vendor,
the agony of uncertainty as to the completion of the purchase
inevitably succeeds. Passion of every sort is essentially Jesuitical.
Here was a man who thought that education was useless, forcing himself
to believe in the influence of education. He was mortgaging thirty
thousand francs upon the ideas of honor and conduct which education
should have developed in his son; David had received a good training,
so David would sweat blood and water to fulfil his engagements; David's
knowledge would discover new resources; and David seemed to be full of
fine feelings, so--David would pay! Many a parent does in this way, and
thinks that he has acted a father's part; old Sechard was quite of that
opinion by the time that he had reached his vineyard at Marsac, a
hamlet some four leagues out of Angouleme. The previous owner had built
a nice little house on the bit of property, and from year to year had
added other bits of land to it, until in 1809 the old "bear" bought the
whole, and went thither, exchanging the toil of the printing press for
the labor of the winepress. As he put it himself, "he had been in that
line so long that he ought to know something about it."

During
the first twelvemonth of rural retirement, Sechard senior showed a
careful countenance among his vine props; for he was always in his
vineyard now, just as, in the old days, he had lived in his shop, day
in, day out. The prospect of thirty thousand francs was even more
intoxicating than sweet wine; already in imagination he fingered the
coin. The less the claim to the money, the more eager he grew to pouch
it. Not seldom his anxieties sent him hurrying from Marsac to
Angouleme; he would climb up the rocky staircases into the old city and
walk into his son's workshop to see how business went. There stood the
presses in their places; the one apprentice, in a paper cap, was
cleaning the ink-balls; there was a creaking of a press over the
printing of some trade circular, the old type was still unchanged, and
in the dens at the end of the room he saw his son and the foreman
reading books, which the "bear" took for proof-sheets. Then he would
join David at dinner and go back to Marsac, chewing the cud of uneasy
reflection.

Avarice, like love, has the gift of second sight,
instinctively guessing at future contingencies, and hugging its
presentiments. Sechard senior living at a distance, far from the
workshop and the machinery which possessed such a fascination for him,
reminding him, as it did, of days when he was making his way, could
_feel_ that there were disquieting symptoms of inactivity in his son.
The name of Cointet Brothers haunted him like a dread; he saw Sechard
& Son dropping into the second place. In short, the old man scented
misfortune in the wind.

His presentiments were too well founded;
disaster was hovering over the house of Sechard. But there is a
tutelary deity for misers, and by a chain of unforeseen circumstances
that tutelary deity was so ordering matters that the purchase-money of
his extortionate bargain was to be tumbled after all into the old
toper's pouch.

Indifferent to the religious reaction brought
about by the Restoration, indifferent no less to the Liberal movement,
David preserved a most unlucky neutrality on the burning questions of
the day. In those times provincial men of business were bound to
profess political opinions of some sort if they meant to secure custom;
they were forced to choose for themselves between the patronage of the
Liberals on the one hand or the Royalists on the other. And Love,
moreover, had come to David's heart, and with his scientific
preoccupation and finer nature he had not room for the dogged greed of
which our successful man of business is made; it choked the keen
money-getting instinct which would have led him to study the
differences between the Paris trade and the business of a provincial
printing-house. The shades of opinion so sharply defined in the country
are blurred and lost in the great currents of Parisian business life.
Cointet Brothers set themselves deliberately to assimilate all shades
of monarchical opinion. They let every one know that they fasted of a
Friday and kept Lent; they haunted the cathedral; they cultivated the
society of the clergy; and in consequence, when books of devotion were
once more in demand, Cointet Brothers were the first in this lucrative
field. They slandered David, accusing him of Liberalism, Atheism, and
what not. How, asked they, could any one employ a man whose father had
been a Septembrist, a Bonapartist, and a drunkard to boot? The old man
was sure to leave plenty of gold pieces behind him. They themselves
were poor men with families to support, while David was a bachelor and
could do as he pleased; he would have plenty one of these days; he
could afford to take things easily; whereas . . . and so forth and so
forth.

Such tales against David, once put into circulation,
produced their effect. The monopoly of the prefectorial and diocesan
work passed gradually into the hands of Cointet Brothers; and before
long David's keen competitors, emboldened by his inaction, started a
second local sheet of advertisements and announcements. The older
establishment was left at length with the job-printing orders from the
town, and the circulation of the _Charente Chronicle_ fell off by
one-half. Meanwhile the Cointets grew richer; they had made handsome
profits on their devotional books; and now they offered to buy
Sechard's paper, to have all the trade and judicial announcements of
the department in their own hands.

The news of this proposal
sent by David to his father brought the old vinegrower from Marsac into
the Place du Murier with the swiftness of the raven that scents the
corpses on a battlefield.

"Leave me to manage the Cointets," said he to his son; "don't you
meddle in this business."

The
old man saw what the Cointets meant; and they took alarm at his
clearsighted sagacity. His son was making a blunder, he said, and he,
Sechard, had come to put a stop to it.

"What was to become of
the connection if David gave up the paper? It all depended upon the
paper. All the attorneys and solicitors and men of business in
L'Houmeau were Liberals to a man. The Cointets had tried to ruin the
Sechards by accusing them of Liberalism, and by so doing gave them a
plank to cling to--the Sechards should keep the Liberal business. Sell
the paper indeed! Why, you might as well sell the stock-in-trade and
the license!"

Old Sechard asked the Cointets sixty thousand
francs for the printing business, so as not to ruin his son; he was
fond of his son; he was taking his son's part. The vinegrower brought
his son to the front to gain his point, as a peasant brings in his wife.

His
son was unwilling to do this, that, or the other; it varied according
to the offers which he wrung one after another from the Cointets,
until, not without an effort, he drew them on to give twenty-two
thousand francs for the _Charente Chronicle_. But, at the same time,
David must pledge himself thenceforward to print no newspaper
whatsoever, under a penalty of thirty thousand francs for damages.

That
transaction dealt the deathblow to the Sechard establishment; but the
old vinegrower did not trouble himself much on that head. Murder
usually follows robbery. Our worthy friend intended to pay himself with
the ready money. To have the cash in his own hands he would have given
in David himself over and above the bargain, and so much the more
willingly since that this nuisance of a son could claim one-half of the
unexpected windfall. Taking this fact into consideration, therefore,
the generous parent consented to abandon his share of the business but
not the business premises; and the rental was still maintained at the
famous sum of twelve hundred francs per annum.

The old man came
into town very seldom after the paper was sold to the Cointets. He
pleaded his advanced age, but the truth was that he took little
interest in the establishment now that it was his no longer. Still, he
could not quite shake off his old kindness for his stock-in-trade; and
when business brought him into Angouleme, it would have been hard to
say which was the stronger attraction to the old house --his wooden
presses or the son whom (as a matter of form) he asked for rent. The
old foreman, who had gone over to the rival establishment, knew exactly
how much this fatherly generosity was worth; the old fox meant to
reserve a right to interfere in his son's affairs, and had taken care
to appear in the bankruptcy as a privileged creditor for arrears of
rent.

The causes of David's heedlessness throw a light on the
character of that young man. Only a few days after his establishment in
the paternal printing office, he came across an old school friend in
the direst poverty. Lucien Chardon, a young fellow of one-and-twenty or
thereabouts, was the son of a surgeon-major who had retired with a
wound from the republican army. Nature had meant M. Chardon senior for
a chemist; chance opened the way for a retail druggist's business in
Angouleme. After many years of scientific research, death cut him off
in the midst of his incompleted experiments, and the great discovery
that should have brought wealth to the family was never made. Chardon
had tried to find a specific for the gout. Gout is a rich man's malady;
the rich will pay large sums to recover health when they have lost it,
and for this reason the druggist deliberately selected gout as his
problem. Halfway between the man of science on the one side and the
charlatan on the other, he saw that the scientific method was the one
road to assured success, and had studied the causes of the complaint,
and based his remedy on a certain general theory of treatment, with
modifications in practice for varying temperaments. Then, on a visit to
Paris undertaken to solicit the approval of the _Academie des
Sciences_, he died, and lost all the fruits of his labors.

It
may have been that some presentiment of the end had led the country
druggist to do all that in him lay to give his boy and girl a good
education; the family had been living up to the income brought in by
the business; and now when they were left almost destitute, it was an
aggravation of their misfortune that they had been brought up in the
expectations of a brilliant future; for these hopes were extinguished
by their father's death. The great Desplein, who attended Chardon in
his last illness, saw him die in convulsions of rage.

The secret
of the army surgeon's ambition lay in his passionate love for his wife,
the last survivor of the family of Rubempre, saved as by a miracle from
the guillotine in 1793. He had gained time by declaring that she was
pregnant, a lie told without the girl's knowledge or consent. Then,
when in a manner he had created a claim to call her his wife, he had
married her in spite of their common poverty. The children of this
marriage, like all children of love, inherited the mother's wonderful
beauty, that gift so often fatal when accompanied by poverty. The life
of hope and hard work and despair, in all of which Mme. Chardon had
shared with such keen sympathy, had left deep traces in her beautiful
face, just as the slow decline of a scanty income had changed her ways
and habits; but both she and her children confronted evil days bravely
enough. She sold the druggist's shop in the Grand' Rue de L'Houmeau,
the principal suburb of Angouleme; but it was impossible for even one
woman to exist on the three hundred francs of income brought in by the
investment of the purchase-money, so the mother and daughter accepted
the position, and worked to earn a living. The mother went out as a
monthly nurse, and for her gentle manners was preferred to any other
among the wealthy houses, where she lived without expense to her
children, and earned some seven francs a week. To save her son the
embarrassment of seeing his mother reduced to this humble position, she
assumed the name of Madame Charlotte; and persons requiring her
services were requested to apply to M. Postel, M. Chardon's successor
in the business. Lucien's sister worked for a laundress, a decent woman
much respected in L'Houmeau, and earned fifteen daily sous. As Mme.
Prieur's forewoman she had a certain position in the workroom, which
raised her slightly above the class of working-girls.

The two
women's slender earnings, together with Mme. Chardon's three hundred
francs of _rentes_, amounted to about eight hundred francs a year, and
on this sum three persons must be fed, clothed, and lodged. Yet, with
all their frugal thrift, the pittance was scarcely sufficient; nearly
the whole of it was needed for Lucien. Mme. Chardon and her daughter
Eve believed in Lucien as Mahomet's wife believed in her husband; their
devotion for his future knew no bounds. Their present landlord was the
successor to the business, for M. Postel let them have rooms at the
further end of a yard at the back of the laboratory for a very low
rent, and Lucien slept in the poor garret above. A father's passion for
natural science had stimulated the boy, and at first induced him to
follow in the same path. Lucien was one of the most brilliant pupils at
the grammar school of Angouleme, and when David Sechard left, his
future friend was in the third form.

When chance brought the
school-fellows together again, Lucien was weary of drinking from the
rude cup of penury, and ready for any of the rash, decisive steps that
youth takes at the age of twenty. David's generous offer of forty
francs a month if Lucien would come to him and learn the work of a
printer's reader came in time; David had no need whatever of a
printer's reader, but he saved Lucien from despair. The ties of a
school friendship thus renewed were soon drawn closer than ever by the
similarity of their lot in life and the dissimilarity of their
characters. Both felt high swelling hopes of manifold success; both
consciously possessed the high order of intelligence which sets a man
on a level with lofty heights, consigned though they were socially to
the lowest level. Fate's injustice was a strong bond between them. And
then, by different ways, following each his own bent of mind, they had
attained to poesy. Lucien, destined for the highest speculative fields
of natural science, was aiming with hot enthusiasm at fame through
literature; while David, with that meditative temperament which
inclines to poetry, was drawn by his tastes towards natural science.

The
exchange of roles was the beginning of an intellectual comradeship.
Before long, Lucien told David of his own father's farsighted views of
the application of science to manufacture, while David pointed out the
new ways in literature that Lucien must follow if he meant to succeed.
Not many days had passed before the young men's friendship became a
passion such as is only known in early manhood. Then it was that David
caught a glimpse of Eve's fair face, and loved, as grave and meditative
natures can love. The _et nunc et semper et in secula seculorum_ of the
Liturgy is the device taken by many a sublime unknown poet, whose works
consist in magnificent epics conceived and lost between heart and
heart. With a lover's insight, David read the secret hopes set by the
mother and sister on Lucien's poet's brow; and knowing their blind
devotion, it was very sweet to him to draw nearer to his love by
sharing her hopes and her self-sacrifice. And in this way Lucien came
to be David's chosen brother. As there are ultras who would fain be
more Royalist than the King, so David outdid the mother and sister in
his belief in Lucien's genius; he spoiled Lucien as a mother spoils her
child.

Once, under pressure of the lack of money which tied
their hands, the two were ruminating after the manner of young men over
ways of promptly realizing a large fortune; and, after fruitless
shakings of all the trees already stripped by previous comers, Lucien
bethought himself of two of his father's ideas. M. Chardon had talked
of a method of refining sugar by a chemical process, which would reduce
the cost of production by one-half; and he had another plan for
employing an American vegetable fibre for making paper, something after
the Chinese fashion, and effecting an enormous saving in the cost of
raw material. David, knowing the importance of a question raised
already by the Didots, caught at this latter notion, saw a fortune in
it, and looked upon Lucien as the benefactor whom he could never repay.

Any
one may guess how the ruling thoughts and inner life of this pair of
friends unfitted them for carrying on the business of a printing house.
So far from making fifteen to twenty thousand francs, like Cointet
Brothers, printers and publishers to the diocese, and proprietors of
the _Charente Chronicle_ (now the only newspaper in the
department)--Sechard & Son made a bare three hundred francs per
month, out of which the foreman's salary must be paid, as well as
Marion's wages and the rent and taxes; so that David himself was
scarcely making twelve hundred francs per annum. Active and industrious
men of business would have bought new type and new machinery, and made
an effort to secure orders for cheap printing from the Paris book
trade; but master and foreman, deep in absorbing intellectual
interests, were quite content with such orders as came to them from
their remaining customers.

In the long length the Cointets had
come to understand David's character and habits. They did not slander
him now; on the contrary, wise policy required that they should allow
the business to flicker on; it was to their interest indeed to maintain
it in a small way, lest it should fall into the hands of some more
formidable competitor; they made a practice of sending prospectuses and
circulars --job-printing, as it is called--to the Sechard's
establishment. So it came about that, all unwittingly, David owed his
existence, commercially speaking, to the cunning schemes of his
competitors. The Cointets, well pleased with his "craze," as they
called it, behaved to all appearance both fairly and handsomely; but,
as a matter of fact, they were adopting the tactics of the mail-coach
owners who set up a sham opposition coach to keep _bona fide_ rivals
out of the field.

Inside and outside, the condition of
the Sechard printing establishment bore testimony to the sordid avarice
of the old "bear," who never spent a penny on repairs. The old house
had stood in sun and rain, and borne the brunt of the weather, till it
looked like some venerable tree trunk set down at the entrance of the
alley, so riven it was with seams and cracks of all sorts and sizes.
The house front, built of brick and stone, with no pretensions to
symmetry, seemed to be bending beneath the weight of a worm-eaten roof
covered with the curved pantiles in common use in the South of France.
The decrepit casements were fitted with the heavy, unwieldy shutters
necessary in that climate, and held in place by massive iron cross
bars. It would have puzzled you to find a more dilapidated house in
Angouleme; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar kept it together. Try
to picture the workshop, lighted at either end, and dark in the middle;
the walls covered with handbills and begrimed by friction of all the
workmen who had rubbed past them for thirty years; the cobweb of
cordage across the ceiling, the stacks of paper, the old-fashioned
presses, the pile of slabs for weighting the damp sheets, the rows of
cases, and the two dens in the far corners where the master printer and
foreman sat--and you will have some idea of the life led by the two
friends.

One day early in May, 1821, David and Lucien were
standing together by the window that looked into the yard. It was
nearly two o'clock, and the four or five men were going out to dinner.
David waited until the apprentice had shut the street door with the
bell fastened to it; then he drew Lucien out into the yard as if the
smell of paper, ink, and presses and old woodwork had grown intolerable
to him, and together they sat down under the vines, keeping the office
and the door in view. The sunbeams, playing among the trellised
vine-shoots, hovered over the two poets, making, as it were, an aureole
about their heads, bringing the contrast between their faces and their
characters into a vigorous relief that would have tempted the brush of
some great painter.

David's physique was of the kind that Nature
gives to the fighter, the man born to struggle in obscurity, or with
the eyes of all men turned upon him. The strong shoulders, rising above
the broad chest, were in keeping with the full development of his whole
frame. With his thick crop of black hair, his fleshy, high-colored,
swarthy face, supported by a thick neck, he looked at first sight like
one of Boileau's canons: but on a second glance there was that in the
lines about the thick lips, in the dimple of the chin, in the turn of
the square nostrils, with the broad irregular line of central cleavage,
and, above all, in the eyes, with the steady light of an all-absorbing
love that burned in them, which revealed the real character of the
man--the wisdom of the thinker, the strenuous melancholy of a spirit
that discerns the horizon on either side, and sees clearly to the end
of winding ways, turning the clear light of analysis upon the joys of
fruition, known as yet in idea alone, and quick to turn from them in
disgust. You might look for the flash of genius from such a face; you
could not miss the ashes of the volcano; hopes extinguished beneath a
profound sense of the social annihilation to which lowly birth and lack
of fortune condemns so many a loftier mind. And by the side of the poor
printer, who loathed a handicraft so closely allied to intellectual
work, close to this Silenus, joyless, self-sustained, drinking deep
draughts from the cup of knowledge and of poetry that he might forget
the cares of his narrow lot in the intoxication of soul and brain,
stood Lucien, graceful as some sculptured Indian Bacchus.

For in
Lucien's face there was the distinction of line which stamps the beauty
of the antique; the Greek profile, with the velvet whiteness of women's
faces, and eyes full of love, eyes so blue that they looked dark
against a pearly setting, and dewy and fresh as those of a child. Those
beautiful eyes looked out from under their long chestnut lashes,
beneath eyebrows that might have been traced by a Chinese pencil. The
silken down on his cheeks, like his bright curling hair, shone golden
in the sunlight. A divine graciousness transfused the white temples
that caught that golden gleam; a matchless nobleness had set its seal
in the short chin raised, but not abruptly. The smile that hovered
about the coral lips, yet redder as they seemed by force of contrast
with the even teeth, was the smile of some sorrowing angel. Lucien's
hands denoted race; they were shapely hands; hands that men obey at a
sign, and women love to kiss. Lucien was slender and of middle height.
From a glance at his feet, he might have been taken for a girl in
disguise, and this so much the more easily from the feminine contour of
the hips, a characteristic of keen-witted, not to say, astute, men.
This is a trait which seldom misleads, and in Lucien it was a true
indication of character; for when he analyzed the society of to-day,
his restless mind was apt to take its stand on the lower ground of
those diplomatists who hold that success justifies the use of any means
however base. It is one of the misfortunes attendant upon great
intellects that perforce they comprehend all things, both good and evil.

The
two young men judged society by the more lofty standard because their
social position was at the lowest end of the scale, for unrecognized
power is apt to avenge itself for lowly station by viewing the world
from a lofty standpoint. Yet it is, nevertheless, true that they grew
but the more bitter and hopeless after these swift soaring flights to
the upper regions of thought, their world by right. Lucien had read
much and compared; David had thought much and deeply. In spite of the
young printer's look of robust, country-bred health, his turn of mind
was melancholy and somewhat morbid--he lacked confidence in himself;
but Lucien, on the other hand, with a boldness little to be expected
from his feminine, almost effeminate, figure, graceful though it was,
Lucien possessed the Gascon temperament to the highest degree--rash,
brave, and adventurous, prone to make the most of the bright side, and
as little as possible of the dark; his was the nature that sticks at no
crime if there is anything to be gained by it, and laughs at the vice
which serves as a stepping-stone. Just now these tendencies of ambition
were held in check, partly by the fair illusions of youth, partly by
the enthusiasm which led him to prefer the nobler methods, which every
man in love with glory tries first of all. Lucien was struggling as yet
with himself and his own desires, and not with the difficulties of
life; at strife with his own power, and not with the baseness of other
men, that fatal exemplar for impressionable minds. The brilliancy of
his intellect had a keen attraction for David. David admired his
friend, while he kept him out of the scrapes into which he was led by
the _furie francaise_.

David, with his well-balanced mind and
timid nature at variance with a strong constitution, was by no means
wanting in the persistence of the Northern temper; and if he saw all
the difficulties before him, none the less he vowed to himself to
conquer, never to give way. In him the unswerving virtue of an apostle
was softened by pity that sprang from inexhaustible indulgence. In the
friendship grown old already, one was the worshiper, and that one was
David; Lucien ruled him like a woman sure of love, and David loved to
give way. He felt that his friend's physical beauty implied a real
superiority, which he accepted, looking upon himself as one made of
coarser and commoner human clay.

"The ox for patient labor in
the fields, the free life for the bird," he thought to himself. "I will
be the ox, and Lucien shall be the eagle."

So for three years
these friends had mingled the destinies bright with such glorious
promise. Together they read the great works that appeared above the
horizon of literature and science since the Peace --the poems of
Schiller, Goethe, and Byron, the prose writings of Scott, Jean-Paul,
Berzelius, Davy, Cuvier, Lamartine, and many more. They warmed
themselves beside these great hearthfires; they tried their powers in
abortive creations, in work laid aside and taken up again with new glow
of enthusiasm. Incessantly they worked with the unwearied vitality of
youth; comrades in poverty, comrades in the consuming love of art and
science, till they forgot the hard life of the present, for their minds
were wholly bent on laying the foundations of future fame.

"Lucien," said David, "do you know what I have just received from
Paris?" He drew a tiny volume from his pocket. "Listen!"

And
David read, as a poet can read, first Andre de Chenier's Idyll _Neere_,
then _Le Malade_, following on with the Elegy on a Suicide, another
elegy in the classic taste, and the last two _Iambes_.

"So that
is Andre de Chenier!" Lucien exclaimed again and again. "It fills one
with despair!" he cried for the third time, when David surrendered the
book to him, unable to read further for emotion.--"A poet rediscovered
by a poet!" said Lucien, reading the signature of the preface.

"After Chenier had written those poems, he thought that he had written
nothing worth publishing," added David.

Then
Lucien in his turn read aloud the fragment of an epic called
_L'Aveugle_ and two or three of the Elegies, till, when he came upon
the line--

If they know not bliss, is there happiness on earth?

He pressed the book to his lips, and tears came to the eyes of either,
for the two friends were lovers and fellow-worshipers.

The
vine-stems were changing color with the spring; covering the rifted,
battered walls of the old house where squalid cracks were spreading in
every direction, with fluted columns and knots and bas-reliefs and
uncounted masterpieces of I know not what order of architecture,
erected by fairy hands. Fancy had scattered flowers and crimson gems
over the gloomy little yard, and Chenier's _Camille_ became for David
the Eve whom he worshiped, for Lucien a great lady to whom he paid his
homage. Poetry had shaken out her starry robe above the workshop where
the "monkeys" and "bears" were grotesquely busy among types and
presses. Five o'clock struck, but the friends felt neither hunger nor
thirst; life had turned to a golden dream, and all the treasures of the
world lay at their feet. Far away on the horizon lay the blue streak to
which Hope points a finger in storm and stress; and a siren voice
sounded in their ears, calling, "Come, spread your wings; through that
streak of gold or silver or azure lies the sure way of escape from evil
fortune!"

Just at that moment the low glass door of the workshop
was opened, and out came Cerizet, an apprentice (David had brought the
urchin from Paris). This youth introduced a stranger, who saluted the
friends politely, and spoke to David.

"This, sir, is a monograph
which I am desirous of printing," said he, drawing a huge package of
manuscript from his pocket. "Will you oblige me with an estimate?"

"We
do not undertake work on such a scale, sir," David answered, without
looking at the manuscript. "You had better see the Messieurs Cointet
about it."

"Still we have a very pretty type which might suit
it," put in Lucien, taking up the roll. "We must ask you to be kind
enough, sir, to leave your commission with us and call again to-morrow,
and we will give you an estimate."

"Have I the pleasure of addressing M. Lucien Chardon?"

"Yes, sir," said the foreman.

"I
am fortunate in this opportunity of meeting with a young poet destined
to such greatness," returned the author. "Mme. de Bargeton sent me
here."

Lucien flushed red at the name, and stammered out
something about gratitude for the interest which Mme. de Bargeton took
in him. David noticed his friend's embarrassed flush, and left him in
conversation with the country gentleman, the author of a monograph on
silkwork cultivation, prompted by vanity to print the effort for the
benefit of fellow-members of the local agricultural society.

When the author had gone, David spoke.

"Lucien, are you in love with Mme. de Bargeton?"

"Passionately."

"But social prejudices set you as far apart as if she were living at
Pekin and you in Greenland."

"The will of two lovers can rise victorious over all things," said
Lucien, lowering his eyes.

"You will forget us," returned the alarmed lover, as Eve's fair face
rose before his mind.

"On the contrary, I have perhaps sacrificed my love to you," cried
Lucien.

"What do you mean?"

"In
spite of my love, in spite of the different motives which bid me obtain
a secure footing in her house, I have told her that I will never go
thither again unless another is made welcome too, a man whose gifts are
greater than mine, a man destined for a brilliant future --David
Sechard, my brother, my friend. I shall find an answer waiting when I
go home. All the aristocrats may have been asked to hear me read my
verses this evening, but I shall not go if the answer is negative, and
I will never set foot in Mme. de Bargeton's house again."

David brushed the tears from his eyes, and wrung Lucien's hand. The
clock struck six.

"Eve must be anxious; good-bye," Lucien added abruptly.

He
hurried away. David stood overcome by the emotion that is only felt to
the full at his age, and more especially in such a position as his
--the friends were like two young swans with wings unclipped as yet by
the experiences of provincial life.

"Heart of gold!" David exclaimed to himself, as his eyes followed
Lucien across the workshop.

Lucien
went down to L'Houmeau along the broad Promenade de Beaulieu, the Rue
du Minage, and Saint-Peter's Gate. It was the longest way round, so you
may be sure that Mme. de Bargeton's house lay on the way. So delicious
it was to pass under her windows, though she knew nothing of his
presence, that for the past two months he had gone round daily by the
Palet Gate into L'Houmeau.

Under the trees of Beaulieu he saw
how far the suburb lay from the city. The custom of the country,
moreover, had raised other barriers harder to surmount than the mere
physical difficulty of the steep flights of steps which Lucien was
descending. Youth and ambition had thrown the flying-bridge of glory
across the gulf between the city and the suburb, yet Lucien was as
uneasy in his mind over his lady's answer as any king's favorite who
has tried to climb yet higher, and fears that being over-bold he is
like to fall. This must seem a dark saying to those who have never
studied the manners and customs of cities divided into the upper and
lower town; wherefore it is necessary to enter here upon some
topographical details, and this so much the more if the reader is to
comprehend the position of one of the principal characters in the
story--Mme. de Bargeton.

The old city of Angouleme is perched
aloft on a crag like a sugar-loaf, overlooking the plain where the
Charente winds away through the meadows. The crag is an outlying spur
on the Perigord side of a long, low ridge of hill, which terminates
abruptly just above the road from Paris to Bordeaux, so that the Rock
of Angouleme is a sort of promontory marking out the line of three
picturesque valleys. The ramparts and great gateways and ruined
fortress on the summit of the crag still remain to bear witness to the
importance of this stronghold during the Religious Wars, when Angouleme
was a military position coveted alike of Catholics and Calvinists, but
its old-world strength is a source of weakness in modern days;
Angouleme could not spread down to the Charente, and shut in between
its ramparts and the steep sides of the crag, the old town is condemned
to stagnation of the most fatal kind.

The Government made an
attempt about this very time to extend the town towards Perigord,
building a Prefecture, a Naval School, and barracks along the hillside,
and opening up roads. But private enterprise had been beforehand
elsewhere. For some time past the suburb of L'Houmeau had sprung up, a
mushroom growth at the foot of the crag and along the river-side, where
the direct road runs from Paris to Bordeaux. Everybody has heard of the
great paper-mills of Angouleme, established perforce three hundred
years ago on the Charente and its branch streams, where there was a
sufficient fall of water. The largest State factory of marine ordnance
in France was established at Ruelle, some six miles away. Carriers,
wheelwrights, posthouses, and inns, every agency for public conveyance,
every industry that lives by road or river, was crowded together in
Lower Angouleme, to avoid the difficulty of the ascent of the hill.
Naturally, too, tanneries, laundries, and all such waterside trades
stood within reach of the Charente; and along the banks of the river
lay the stores of brandy and great warehouses full of the water-borne
raw material; all the carrying trade of the Charente, in short, had
lined the quays with buildings.

So the Faubourg of L'Houmeau
grew into a busy and prosperous city, a second Angouleme rivaling the
upper town, the residence of the powers that be, the lords spiritual
and temporal of Angouleme; though L'Houmeau, with all its business and
increasing greatness, was still a mere appendage of the city above. The
_noblesse_ and officialdom dwelt on the crag, trade and wealth remained
below. No love was lost between these two sections of the community all
the world over, and in Angouleme it would have been hard to say which
of the two camps detested the other the more cordially. Under the
Empire the machinery worked fairly smoothly, but the Restoration
wrought both sides to the highest pitch of exasperation.

Nearly
every house in the upper town of Angouleme is inhabited by noble, or at
any rate by old burgher, families, who live independently on their
incomes--a sort of autochthonous nation who suffer no aliens to come
among them. Possibly, after two hundred years of unbroken residence,
and it may be an intermarriage or two with one of the primordial
houses, a family from some neighboring district may be adopted, but in
the eyes of the aboriginal race they are still newcomers of yesterday.

Prefects,
receivers-general, and various administrations that have come and gone
during the last forty years, have tried to tame the ancient families
perched aloft like wary ravens on their crag; the said families were
always willing to accept invitations to dinners and dances; but as to
admitting the strangers to their own houses, they were inexorable.
Ready to scoff and disparage, jealous and niggardly, marrying only
among themselves, the families formed a serried phalanx to keep out
intruders. Of modern luxury they had no notion; and as for sending a
boy to Paris, it was sending him, they thought to certain ruin. Such
sagacity will give a sufficient idea of the old-world manners and
customs of this society, suffering from thick-headed Royalism, infected
with bigotry rather than zeal, all stagnating together, motionless as
their town founded upon a rock. Yet Angouleme enjoyed a great
reputation in the provinces round about for its educational advantages,
and neighboring towns sent their daughters to its boarding schools and
convents.

It is easy to imagine the influence of the class
sentiment which held Angouleme aloof from L'Houmeau. The merchant
classes are rich, the _noblesse_ are usually poor. Each side takes its
revenge in scorn of the other. The tradespeople in Angouleme espouse
the quarrel. "He is a man of L'Houmeau!" a shopkeeper of the upper town
will tell you, speaking of a merchant in the lower suburb, throwing an
accent into the speech which no words can describe. When the
Restoration defined the position of the French _noblesse_, holding out
hopes to them which could only be realized by a complete and general
topsy-turvydom, the distance between Angouleme and L'Houmeau, already
more strongly marked than the distance between the hill and plain, was
widened yet further. The better families, all devoted as one man to the
Government, grew more exclusive here than in any other part of France.
"The man of L'Houmeau" became little better than a pariah. Hence the
deep, smothered hatred which broke out everywhere with such ugly
unanimity in the insurrection of 1830 and destroyed the elements of a
durable social system in France. As the overweening haughtiness of the
Court nobles detached the provincial _noblesse_ from the throne, so did
these last alienate the _bourgeoisie_ from the royal cause by behavior
that galled their vanity in every possible way.

So "a man of
L'Houmeau," a druggist's son, in Mme. de Bargeton's house was nothing
less than a little revolution. Who was responsible for it? Lamartine
and Victor Hugo, Casimir Delavigne and Canalis, Beranger and
Chateaubriand. Davrigny, Benjamin Constant and Lamennais, Cousin and
Michaud,--all the old and young illustrious names in literature in
short, Liberals and Royalists, alike must divide the blame among them.
Mme. de Bargeton loved art and letters, eccentric taste on her part, a
craze deeply deplored in Angouleme. In justice to the lady, it is
necessary to give a sketch of the previous history of a woman born to
shine, and left by unlucky circumstances in the shade, a woman whose
influence decided Lucien's career.

M. de Bargeton was the
great-grandson of an alderman of Bordeaux named Mirault, ennobled under
Louis XIII. for long tenure of office. His son, bearing the name of
Mirault de Bargeton, became an officer in the household troops of Louis
XIV., and married so great a fortune that in the reign of Louis XV. his
son dropped the Mirault and was called simply M. de Bargeton. This M.
de Bargeton, the alderman's grandson, lived up to his quality so
strenuously that he ran through the family property and checked the
course of its fortunes. Two of his brothers indeed, great-uncles of the
present Bargeton, went into business again, for which reason you will
find the name of Mirault among Bordeaux merchants at this day. The
lands of Bargeton, in Angoumois in the barony of Rochefoucauld, being
entailed, and the house in Angouleme, called the Hotel Bargeton,
likewise, the grandson of M. de Bargeton the Waster came in for these
hereditaments; though the year 1789 deprived him of all seignorial
rights save to the rents paid by his tenants, which amounted to some
ten thousand francs per annum. If his grandsire had but walked in the
ways of his illustrious progenitors, Bargeton I. and Bargeton II.,
Bargeton V. (who may be dubbed Bargeton the Mute by way of distinction)
should by rights have been born to the title of Marquis of Bargeton; he
would have been connected with some great family or other, and in due
time he would have been a duke and a peer of France, like many another;
whereas, in 1805, he thought himself uncommonly lucky when he married
Mlle. Marie-Louise-Anais de Negrepelisse, the daughter of a noble long
relegated to the obscurity of his manor-house, scion though he was of
the younger branch of one of the oldest families in the south of
France. There had been a Negrepelisse among the hostages of St. Louis.
The head of the elder branch, however, had borne the illustrious name
of d'Espard since the reign of Henri Quatre, when the Negrepelisse of
that day married an heiress of the d'Espard family. As for M. de
Negrepelisse, the younger son of a younger son, he lived upon his
wife's property, a small estate in the neighborhood of Barbezieux,
farming the land to admiration, selling his corn in the market himself,
and distilling his own brandy, laughing at those who ridiculed him, so
long as he could pile up silver crowns, and now and again round out his
estate with another bit of land.

Circumstances unusual enough in
out-of-the-way places in the country had inspired Mme. de Bargeton with
a taste for music and reading. During the Revolution one Abbe Niollant,
the Abbe Roze's best pupil, found a hiding-place in the old manor-house
of Escarbas, and brought with him his baggage of musical compositions.
The old country gentleman's hospitality was handsomely repaid, for the
Abbe undertook his daughter's education. Anais, or Nais, as she was
called must otherwise have been left to herself, or, worse still, to
some coarse-minded servant-maid. The Abbe was not only a musician, he
was well and widely read, and knew both Italian and German; so Mlle. de
Negrepelise received instruction in those tongues, as well as in
counterpoint. He explained the great masterpieces of the French,
German, and Italian literatures, and deciphered with her the music of
the great composers. Finally, as time hung heavy on his hands in the
seclusion enforced by political storms, he taught his pupil Latin and
Greek and some smatterings of natural science. A mother might have
modified the effects of a man's education upon a young girl, whose
independent spirit had been fostered in the first place by a country
life. The Abbe Niollant, an enthusiast and a poet, possessed the
artistic temperament in a peculiarly high degree, a temperament
compatible with many estimable qualities, but prone to raise itself
above _bourgeois_ prejudices by the liberty of its judgments and
breadth of view. In society an intellect of this order wins pardon for
its boldness by its depth and originality; but in private life it would
seem to do positive mischief, by suggesting wanderings from the beaten
track. The Abbe was by no means wanting in goodness of heart, and his
ideas were therefore the more contagious for this high-spirited girl,
in whom they were confirmed by a lonely life. The Abbe Niollant's pupil
learned to be fearless in criticism and ready in judgement; it never
occurred to her tutor that qualities so necessary in a man are
disadvantages in a woman destined for the homely life of a
house-mother. And though the Abbe constantly impressed it upon his
pupil that it behoved her to be the more modest and gracious with the
extent of her attainments, Mlle. de Negrepelisse conceived an excellent
opinion of herself and a robust contempt for ordinary humanity. All
those about her were her inferiors, or persons who hastened to do her
bidding, till she grew to be as haughty as a great lady, with none of
the charming blandness and urbanity of a great lady. The instincts of
vanity were flattered by the pride that the poor Abbe took in his
pupil, the pride of an author who sees himself in his work, and for her
misfortune she met no one with whom she could measure herself.
Isolation is one of the greatest drawbacks of a country life. We lose
the habit of putting ourselves to any inconvenience for the sake of
others when there is no one for whom to make the trifling sacrifices of
personal effort required by dress and manner. And everything in us
shares in the change for the worse; the form and the spirit deteriorate
together.

With no social intercourse to compel self-repression,
Mlle. de Negrepelisse's bold ideas passed into her manner and the
expression of her face. There was a cavalier air about her, a something
that seems at first original, but only suited to women of adventurous
life. So this education, and the consequent asperities of character,
which would have been softened down in a higher social sphere, could
only serve to make her ridiculous at Angouleme so soon as her adorers
should cease to worship eccentricities that charm only in youth.

As
for M. de Negrepelisse, he would have given all his daughter's books to
save the life of a sick bullock; and so miserly was he, that he would
not have given her two farthings over and above the allowance to which
she had a right, even if it had been a question of some indispensable
trifle for her education.

In 1802 the Abbe died, before the
marriage of his dear child, a marriage which he, doubtless, would never
have advised. The old father found his daughter a great care now that
the Abbe was gone. The high-spirited girl, with nothing else to do, was
sure to break into rebellion against his niggardliness, and he felt
quite unequal to the struggle. Like all young women who leave the
appointed track of woman's life, Nais had her own opinions about
marriage, and had no great inclination thereto. She shrank from
submitting herself, body and soul, to the feeble, undignified specimens
of mankind whom she had chanced to meet. She wished to rule, marriage
meant obedience; and between obedience to coarse caprices and a mind
without indulgence for her tastes, and flight with a lover who should
please her, she would not have hesitated for a moment.

M. de
Negrepelisse maintained sufficient of the tradition of birth to dread a
_mesalliance_. Like many another parent, he resolved to marry his
daughter, not so much on her account as for his own peace of mind. A
noble or a country gentleman was the man for him, somebody not too
clever, incapable of haggling over the account of the trust; stupid
enough and easy enough to allow Nais to have her own way, and
disinterested enough to take her without a dowry. But where to look for
a son-in-law to suit father and daughter equally well, was the problem.
Such a man would be the phoenix of sons-in-law.

To M. de
Negrepelisse pondering over the eligible bachelors of the province with
these double requirements in his mind. M. de Bargeton seemed to be the
only one who answered to this description. M. de Bargeton, aged forty,
considerably shattered by the amorous dissipations of his youth, was
generally held to be a man of remarkably feeble intellect; but he had
just the exact amount of commonsense required for the management of his
fortune, and breeding sufficient to enable him to avoid blunders or
blatant follies in society in Angouleme. In the bluntest manner M. de
Negrepelisse pointed out the negative virtues of the model husband
designed for his daughter, and made her see the way to manage him so as
to secure her own happiness. So Nais married the bearer of arms, two
hundred years old already, for the Bargeton arms are blazoned thus:
_the first or, three attires gules; the second, three ox's heads
cabossed, two and one, sable; the third, barry of six, azure and
argent, in the first, six shells or, three, two, and one_. Provided
with a chaperon, Nais could steer her fortunes as she chose under the
style of the firm, and with the help of such connections as her wit and
beauty would obtain for her in Paris. Nais was enchanted by the
prospect of such liberty. M. de Bargeton was of the opinion that he was
making a brilliant marriage, for he expected that in no long while M.
de Negrepelisse would leave him the estates which he was rounding out
so lovingly; but to an unprejudiced spectator it certainly seemed as
though the duty of writing the bridegroom's epitaph might devolve upon
his father-in-law.

By this time Mme. de Bargeton was thirty-six
years old and her husband fifty-eight. The disparity in age was the
more startling since M. de Bargeton looked like a man of seventy,
whereas his wife looked scarcely half her age. She could still wear
rose-color, and her hair hanging loose upon her shoulders. Although
their income did not exceed twelve thousand francs, they ranked among
the half-dozen largest fortunes in the old city, merchants and
officials excepted; for M. and Mme. de Bargeton were obliged to live in
Angouleme until such time as Mme. de Bargeton's inheritance should fall
in and they could go to Paris. Meanwhile they were bound to be
attentive to old M. de Negrepelisse (who kept them waiting so long that
his son-in-law in fact predeceased him), and Nais' brilliant
intellectual gifts, and the wealth that lay like undiscovered ore in
her nature, profited her nothing, underwent the transforming operation
of Time and changed to absurdities. For our absurdities spring, in
fact, for the most part, from the good in us, from some faculty or
quality abnormally developed. Pride, untempered by intercourse with the
great world becomes stiff and starched by contact with petty things; in
a loftier moral atmosphere it would have grown to noble magnanimity.
Enthusiasm, that virtue within a virtue, forming the saint, inspiring
the devotion hidden from all eyes and glowing out upon the world in
verse, turns to exaggeration, with the trifles of a narrow existence
for its object. Far away from the centres of light shed by great minds,
where the air is quick with thought, knowledge stands still, taste is
corrupted like stagnant water, and passion dwindles, frittered away
upon the infinitely small objects which it strives to exalt. Herein
lies the secret of the avarice and tittle-tattle that poison provincial
life. The contagion of narrow-mindedness and meanness affects the
noblest natures; and in such ways as these, men born to be great, and
women who would have been charming if they had fallen under the forming
influence of greater minds, are balked of their lives.

Here was
Mme. de Bargeton, for instance, smiting the lyre for every trifle, and
publishing her emotions indiscriminately to her circle. As a matter of
fact, when sensations appeal to an audience of one, it is better to
keep them to ourselves. A sunset certainly is a glorious poem; but if a
woman describes it, in high-sounding words, for the benefit of
matter-of-fact people, is she not ridiculous? There are pleasures which
can only be felt to the full when two souls meet, poet and poet, heart
and heart. She had a trick of using high-sounding phrases, interlarded
with exaggerated expressions, the kind of stuff ingeniously nicknamed
_tartines_ by the French journalist, who furnishes a daily supply of
the commodity for a public that daily performs the difficult feat of
swallowing it. She squandered superlatives recklessly in her talk, and
the smallest things took giant proportions. It was at this period of
her career that she began to type-ize, individualize, synthesize,
dramatize, superiorize, analyze, poetize, angelize, neologize,
tragedify, prosify, and colossify--you must violate the laws of
language to find words to express the new-fangled whimsies in which
even women here and there indulge. The heat of her language
communicated itself to the brain, and the dithyrambs on her lips were
spoken out of the abundance of her heart. She palpitated, swooned, and
went into ecstasies over anything and everything, over the devotion of
a sister of Charity, and the execution of the brothers Fauchet, over M.
d'Arlincourt's _Ipsiboe_, Lewis' _Anaconda_, or the escape of La
Valette, or the presence of mind of a lady friend who put burglars to
flight by imitating a man's voice. Everything was heroic,
extraordinary, strange, wonderful, and divine. She would work herself
into a state of excitement, indignation, or depression; she soared to
heaven, and sank again, gazed at the sky, or looked to earth; her eyes
were always filled with tears. She wore herself out with chronic
admiration, and wasted her strength on curious dislikes. Her mind ran
on the Pasha of Janina; she would have liked to try conclusions with
him in his seraglio, and had a great notion of being sewn in a sack and
thrown into the water. She envied that blue-stocking of the desert,
Lady Hester Stanhope; she longed to be a sister of Saint Camilla and
tend the sick and die of yellow fever in a hospital at Barcelona; 'twas
a high, a noble destiny! In short, she thirsted for any draught but the
clear spring water of her own life, flowing hidden among green
pastures. She adored Byron and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or anybody else
with a picturesque or dramatic career. Her tears were ready to flow for
every misfortune; she sang paeans for every victory. She sympathized
with the fallen Napoleon, and with Mehemet Ali, massacring the foreign
usurpers of Egypt. In short, any kind of genius was accommodated with
an aureole, and she was fully persuaded that gifted immortals lived on
incense and light.

A good many people looked upon her as a
harmless lunatic, but in these extravagances of hers a keener observer
surely would have seen the broken fragments of a magnificent edifice
that had crumbled into ruin before it was completed, the stones of a
heavenly Jerusalem--love, in short, without a lover. And this was
indeed the fact.

The story of the first eighteen years of Mme.
de Bargeton's married life can be summed up in a few words. For a long
while she lived upon herself and distant hopes. Then, when she began to
see that their narrow income put the longed-for life in Paris quite out
of the question, she looked about her at the people with whom her life
must be spent, and shuddered at her loneliness. There was not a single
man who could inspire the madness to which women are prone when they
despair of a life become stale and unprofitable in the present, and
with no outlook for the future. She had nothing to look for, nothing to
expect from chance, for there are lives in which chance plays no part.
But when the Empire was in the full noonday of glory, and Napoleon was
sending the flower of his troops to the Peninsula, her disappointed
hopes revived. Natural curiosity prompted her to make an effort to see
the heroes who were conquering Europe in obedience to a word from the
Emperor in the order of the day; the heroes of a modern time who outdid
the mythical feats of paladins of old. The cities of France, however
avaricious or refractory, must perforce do honor to the Imperial Guard,
and mayors and prefects went out to meet them with set speeches as if
the conquerors had been crowned kings. Mme. de Bargeton went to a
_ridotto_ given to the town by a regiment, and fell in love with an
officer of a good family, a sub-lieutenant, to whom the crafty Napoleon
had given a glimpse of the baton of a Marshal of France. Love,
restrained, greater and nobler than the ties that were made and unmade
so easily in those days, was consecrated coldly by the hands of death.
On the battlefield of Wagram a shell shattered the only record of Mme.
de Bargeton's young beauty, a portrait worn on the heart of the Marquis
of Cante-Croix. For long afterwards she wept for the young soldier, the
colonel in his second campaign, for the heart hot with love and glory
that set a letter from Nais above Imperial favor. The pain of those
days cast a veil of sadness over her face, a shadow that only vanished
at the terrible age when a woman first discovers with dismay that the
best years of her life are over, and she has had no joy of them; when
she sees her roses wither, and the longing for love is revived again
with the desire to linger yet for a little on the last smiles of youth.
Her nobler qualities dealt so many wounds to her soul at the moment
when the cold of the provinces seized upon her. She would have died of
grief like the ermine if by chance she had been sullied by contact with
those men whose thoughts are bent on winning a few sous nightly at
cards after a good dinner; pride saved her from the shabby love
intrigues of the provinces. A woman so much above the level of those
about her, forced to decide between the emptiness of the men whom she
meets and the emptiness of her own life, can make but one choice;
marriage and society became a cloister for Anais. She lived by poetry
as the Carmelite lives by religion. All the famous foreign books
published in France for the first time between 1815 and 1821, the great
essayists, M. de Bonald and M. de Maistre (those two eagles of
thought)--all the lighter French literature, in short, that appeared
during that sudden outburst of first vigorous growth might bring
delight into her solitary life, but not flexibility of mind or body.
She stood strong and straight like some forest tree, lightning-blasted
but still erect. Her dignity became a stilted manner, her social
supremacy led her into affectation and sentimental over-refinements;
she queened it with her foibles, after the usual fashion of those who
allow their courtiers to adore them.

This was Mme. de Bargeton's
past life, a dreary chronicle which must be given if Lucien's position
with regard to the lady is to be comprehensible. Lucien's introduction
came about oddly enough. In the previous winter a newcomer had brought
some interest into Mme. de Bargeton's monotonous life. The place of
controller of excise fell vacant, and M. de Barante appointed a man
whose adventurous life was a sufficient passport to the house of the
sovereign lady who had her share of feminine curiosity.

M. de
Chatelet--he began life as plain Sixte Chatelet, but since 1806 had the
wit to adopt the particle--M. du Chatelet was one of the agreeable
young men who escaped conscription after conscription by keeping very
close to the Imperial sun. He had begun his career as private secretary
to an Imperial Highness, a post for which he possessed every
qualification. Personable and of a good figure, a clever
billiard-player, a passable amateur actor, he danced well, and excelled
in most physical exercises; he could, moreover, sing a ballad and
applaud a witticism. Supple, envious, never at a loss, there was
nothing that he did not know--nothing that he really knew. He knew
nothing, for instance, of music, but he could sit down to the piano and
accompany, after a fashion, a woman who consented after much pressing
to sing a ballad learned by heart in a month of hard practice.
Incapable though he was of any feeling for poetry, he would boldly ask
permission to retire for ten minutes to compose an impromptu, and
return with a quatrain, flat as a pancake, wherein rhyme did duty for
reason. M. du Chatelet had besides a very pretty talent for filling in
the ground of the Princess' worsted work after the flowers had been
begun; he held her skeins of silk with infinite grace, entertained her
with dubious nothings more or less transparently veiled. He was
ignorant of painting, but he could copy a landscape, sketch a head in
profile, or design a costume and color it. He had, in short, all the
little talents that a man could turn to such useful account in times
when women exercised more influence in public life than most people
imagine. Diplomacy he claimed to be his strong point; it usually is
with those who have no knowledge, and are profound by reason of their
emptiness; and, indeed, this kind of skill possesses one signal
advantage, for it can only be displayed in the conduct of the affairs
of the great, and when discretion is the quality required, a man who
knows nothing can safely say nothing, and take refuge in a mysterious
shake of the head; in fact; the cleverest practitioner is he who can
swim with the current and keep his head well above the stream of events
which he appears to control, a man's fitness for this business varying
inversely as his specific gravity. But in this particular art or craft,
as in all others, you shall find a thousand mediocrities for one man of
genius; and in spite of Chatelet's services, ordinary and
extraordinary, Her Imperial Highness could not procure a seat in the
Privy Council for her private secretary; not that he would not have
made a delightful Master of Requests, like many another, but the
Princess was of the opinion that her secretary was better placed with
her than anywhere else in the world. He was made a Baron, however, and
went to Cassel as envoy-extraordinary, no empty form of words, for he
cut a very extraordinary figure there--Napoleon used him as a
diplomatic courier in the thick of a European crisis. Just as he had
been promised the post of minister to Jerome in Westphalia, the Empire
fell to pieces; and balked of his _ambassade de famille_ as he called
it, he went off in despair to Egypt with General de Montriveau. A
strange chapter of accidents separated him from his traveling
companion, and for two long years Sixte du Chatelet led a wandering
life among the Arab tribes of the desert, who sold and resold their
captive--his talents being not of the slightest use to the nomad
tribes. At length, about the time that Montriveau reached Tangier,
Chatelet found himself in the territory of the Imam of Muscat, had the
luck to find an English vessel just about to set sail, and so came back
to Paris a year sooner than his sometime companion. Once in Paris, his
recent misfortunes, and certain connections of long standing, together
with services rendered to great persons now in power, recommended him
to the President of the Council, who put him in M. de Barante's
department until such time as a controllership should fall vacant. So
the part that M. du Chatelet once had played in the history of the
Imperial Princess, his reputation for success with women, the strange
story of his travels and sufferings, all awakened the interest of the
ladies of Angouleme.

M. le Baron Sixte du Chatelet informed
himself as to the manners and customs of the upper town, and took his
cue accordingly. He appeared on the scene as a jaded man of the world,
broken in health, and weary in spirit. He would raise his hand to his
forehead at all seasons, as if pain never gave him a moment's respite,
a habit that recalled his travels and made him interesting. He was on
visiting terms with the authorities--the general in command, the
prefect, the receiver-general, and the bishop but in every house he was
frigid, polite, and slightly supercilious, like a man out of his proper
place awaiting the favors of power. His social talents he left to
conjecture, nor did they lose anything in reputation on that account;
then when people began to talk about him and wish to know him, and
curiosity was still lively; when he had reconnoitred the men and found
them nought, and studied the women with the eyes of experience in the
cathedral for several Sundays, he saw that Mme. de. Bargeton was the
person with whom it would be best to be on intimate terms. Music, he
thought, should open the doors of a house where strangers were never
received. Surreptitiously he procured one of Miroir's Masses, learned
it upon the piano; and one fine Sunday when all Angouleme went to the
cathedral, he played the organ, sent those who knew no better into
ecstasies over the performance, and stimulated the interest felt in him
by allowing his name to slip out through the attendants. As he came out
after mass, Mme. de Bargeton complimented him, regretting that she had
no opportunity of playing duets with such a musician; and naturally,
during an interview of her own seeking, he received the passport, which
he could not have obtained if he had asked for it.

So the adroit
Baron was admitted to the circle of the queen of Angouleme, and paid
her marked attention. The elderly beau--he was forty-five years
old--saw that all her youth lay dormant and ready to revive, saw
treasures to be turned to account, and possibly a rich widow to wed, to
say nothing of expectations; it would be a marriage into the family of
Negrepelisse, and for him this meant a family connection with the
Marquise d'Espard, and a political career in Paris. Here was a fair
tree to cultivate in spite of the ill-omened, unsightly mistletoe that
grew thick upon it; he would hang his fortunes upon it, and prune it,
and wait till he could gather its golden fruit.

High-born
Angouleme shrieked against the introduction of a Giaour into the
sanctuary, for Mme. de Bargeton's salon was a kind of holy of holies in
a society that kept itself unspotted from the world. The only outsider
intimate there was the bishop; the prefect was admitted twice or thrice
in a year, the receiver-general was never received at all; Mme. de
Bargeton would go to concerts and "at homes" at his house, but she
never accepted invitations to dinner. And now, she who had declined to
open her doors to the receiver-general, welcomed a mere controller of
excise! Here was a novel order of precedence for snubbed authority;
such a thing it had never entered their minds to conceive.

Those
who by dint of mental effort can understand a kind of pettiness which,
for that matter, can be found on any and every social level, will
realize the awe with which the _bourgeoisie_ of Angouleme regarded the
Hotel de Bargeton. The inhabitant of L'Houmeau beheld the grandeur of
that miniature Louvre, the glory of the Angoumoisin Hotel de
Rambouillet, shining at a solar distance; and yet, within it there was
gathered together all the direst intellectual poverty, all the decayed
gentility from twenty leagues round about.

Political opinion
expanded itself in wordy commonplaces vociferated with emphasis; the
_Quotidienne_ was comparatively Laodicean in its loyalty, and Louis
XVIII. a Jacobin. The women, for the most part, were awkward, silly,
insipid, and ill dressed; there was always something amiss that spoiled
the whole; nothing in them was complete, toilette or talk, flesh or
spirit. But for his designs on Mme. de Bargeton, Chatelet could not
have endured the society. And yet the manners and spirit of the noble
in his ruined manor-house, the knowledge of the traditions of good
breeding,--these things covered a multitude of deficiencies. Nobility
of feeling was far more real here than in the lofty world of Paris. You
might compare these country Royalists, if the metaphor may be allowed,
to old-fashioned silver plate, antiquated and tarnished, but weighty;
their attachment to the House of Bourbon as the House of Bourbon did
them honor. The very fixity of their political opinions was a sort of
faithfulness. The distance that they set between themselves and the
_bourgeoisie_, their very exclusiveness, gave them a certain elevation,
and enhanced their value. Each noble represented a certain price for
the townsmen, as Bambara Negroes, we are told, attach a money value to
cowrie shells.

Some of the women, flattered by M. du Chatelet,
discerned in him the superior qualities lacking in the men of their own
sect, and the insurrection of self-love was pacified. These ladies all
hoped to succeed to the Imperial Highness. Purists were of the opinion
that you might see the intruder in Mme. de Bargeton's house, but not
elsewhere. Du Chatelet was fain to put up with a good deal of
insolence, but he held his ground by cultivating the clergy. He
encouraged the queen of Angouleme in foibles bred of the soil; he
brought her all the newest books; he read aloud the poetry that
appeared. Together they went into ecstasies over these poets; she in
all sincerity, he with suppressed yawns; but he bore with the Romantics
with a patience hardly to be expected of a man of the Imperial school,
who scarcely could make out what the young writers meant. Not so Mme.
de Bargeton; she waxed enthusiastic over the renaissance, due to the
return of the Bourbon Lilies; she loved M. de Chateaubriand for calling
Victor Hugo "a sublime child." It depressed her that she could only
know genius from afar, she sighed for Paris, where great men live. For
these reasons M. du Chatelet thought he had done a wonderfully clever
thing when he told the lady that at that moment in Angouleme there was
"another sublime child," a young poet, a rising star whose glory
surpassed the whole Parisian galaxy, though he knew it not. A great man
of the future had been born in L'Houmeau! The headmaster of the school
had shown the Baron some admirable verses. The poor and humble lad was
a second Chatterton, with none of the political baseness and ferocious
hatred of the great ones of earth that led his English prototype to
turn pamphleteer and revile his benefactors. Mme. de Bargeton in her
little circle of five or six persons, who were supposed to share her
tastes for art and letters, because this one scraped a fiddle, and that
splashed sheets of white paper, more or less, with sepia, and the other
was president of a local agricultural society, or was gifted with a
bass voice that rendered _Se fiato in corpo_ like a war whoop --Mme. de
Bargeton amid these grotesque figures was like a famished actor set
down to a stage dinner of pasteboard. No words, therefore, can describe
her joy at these tidings. She must see this poet, this angel! She raved
about him, went into raptures, talked of him for whole hours together.
Before two days were out the sometime diplomatic courier had negotiated
(through the headmaster) for Lucien's appearance in the Hotel de
Bargeton.

Poor helots of the provinces, for whom the distances
between class and class are so far greater than for the Parisian (for
whom, indeed, these distances visibly lessen day by day); souls so
grievously oppressed by the social barriers behind which all sorts and
conditions of men sit crying _Raca_! with mutual anathemas--you, and
you alone, will fully comprehend the ferment in Lucien's heart and
brain, when his awe-inspiring headmaster told him that the great gates
of the Hotel de Bargeton would shortly open and turn upon their hinges
at his fame! Lucien and David, walking together of an evening in the
Promenade de Beaulieu, had looked up at the house with the
old-fashioned gables, and wondered whether their names would ever so
much as reach ears inexorably deaf to knowledge that came from a lowly
origin; and now he (Lucien) was to be made welcome there!

No one
except his sister was in the secret. Eve, like the thrifty housekeeper
and divine magician that she was, conjured up a few louis d'or from her
savings to buy thin shoes for Lucien of the best shoemaker in
Angouleme, and an entirely new suit of clothes from the most renowned
tailor. She made a frill for his best shirt, and washed and pleated it
with her own hands. And how pleased she was to see him so dressed! How
proud she felt of her brother, and what quantities of advice she gave
him! Her intuition foresaw countless foolish fears. Lucien had a habit
of resting his elbows on the table when he was in deep thought; he
would even go so far as to draw a table nearer to lean upon it; Eve
told him that he must not forget himself in those aristocratic
precincts.

She went with him as far as St. Peter's Gate, and
when they were almost opposite the cathedral she stopped, and watched
him pass down the Rue de Beaulieu to the Promenade, where M. du
Chatelet was waiting for him. And after he was out of sight, she still
stood there, poor girl! in a great tremor of emotion, as though some
great thing had happened to them. Lucien in Mme. de Bargeton's
house!--for Eve it meant the dawn of success. The innocent creature did
not suspect that where ambition begins, ingenuous feeling ends.

Externals
in the Rue du Minage gave Lucien no sense of surprise. This palace,
that loomed so large in his imagination, was a house built of the soft
stone of the country, mellowed by time. It looked dismal enough from
the street, and inside it was extremely plain; there was the usual
provincial courtyard--chilly, prim, and neat; and the house itself was
sober, almost convent-like, but in good repair.

Lucien went up
the old staircase with the balustrade of chestnut wood (the stone steps
ceased after the second floor), crossed a shabby antechamber, and came
into the presence in a little wainscoted drawing-room, beyond a
dimly-lit salon. The carved woodwork, in the taste of the eighteenth
century, had been painted gray. There were monochrome paintings on the
frieze panels, and the walls were adorned with crimson damask with a
meagre border. The old-fashioned furniture shrank piteously from sight
under covers of a red-and-white check pattern. On the sofa, covered
with thin mattressed cushions, sat Mme. de Bargeton; the poet beheld
her by the light of two wax candles on a sconce with a screen fitted to
it, that stood before her on a round table with a green cloth.

The
queen did not attempt to rise, but she twisted very gracefully on her
seat, smiling on the poet, who was not a little fluttered by the
serpentine quiverings; her manner was distinguished, he thought. For
Mme. de Bargeton, she was impressed with Lucien's extreme beauty, with
his diffidence, with everything about him; for her the poet already was
poetry incarnate. Lucien scrutinized his hostess with discreet side
glances; she disappointed none of his expectations of a great lady.

Mme.
de Bargeton, following a new fashion, wore a coif of slashed black
velvet, a head-dress that recalls memories of mediaeval legend to a
young imagination, to amplify, as it were, the dignity of womanhood.
Her red-gold hair, escaping from under her cap, hung loose; bright
golden color in the light, red in the rounded shadow of the curls that
only partially hid her neck. Beneath a massive white brow, clean cut
and strongly outlined, shone a pair of bright gray eyes encircled by a
margin of mother-of-pearl, two blue veins on each side of the nose
bringing out the whiteness of that delicate setting. The Bourbon curve
of the nose added to the ardent expression of an oval face; it was as
if the royal temper of the House of Conde shone conspicuous in this
feature. The careless cross-folds of the bodice left a white throat
bare, and half revealed the outlines of a still youthful figure and
shapely, well placed contours beneath.

With fingers tapering and
well-kept, though somewhat too thin, Mme. de Bargeton amiably pointed
to a seat by her side, M. du Chatelet ensconced himself in an
easy-chair, and Lucien then became aware that there was no one else in
the room.

Mme. de Bargeton's words intoxicated the young poet
from L'Houmeau. For Lucien those three hours spent in her presence went
by like a dream that we would fain have last forever. She was not thin,
he thought; she was slender; in love with love, and loverless; and
delicate in spite of her strength. Her foibles, exaggerated by her
manner, took his fancy; for youth sets out with a love of hyperbole,
that infirmity of noble souls. He did not so much as see that her
cheeks were faded, that the patches of color on the cheek-bone were
faded and hardened to a brick-red by listless days and a certain amount
of ailing health. His imagination fastened at once on the glowing eyes,
on the dainty curls rippling with light, on the dazzling fairness of
her skin, and hovered about those bright points as the moth hovers
about the candle flame. For her spirit made such appeal to his that he
could no longer see the woman as she was. Her feminine exaltation had
carried him away, the energy of her expressions, a little staled in
truth by pretty hard and constant wear, but new to Lucien, fascinated
him so much the more easily because he was determined to be pleased. He
had brought none of his own verses to read, but nothing was said of
them; he had purposely left them behind because he meant to return; and
Mme. de Bargeton did not ask for them, because she meant that he should
come back some future day to read them to her. Was not this a beginning
of an understanding?

As for M. Sixte du Chatelet, he was not
over well pleased with all this. He perceived rather too late in the
day that he had a rival in this handsome young fellow. He went with him
as far as the first flight of steps below Beaulieu to try the effect of
a little diplomacy; and Lucien was not a little astonished when he
heard the controller of excise pluming himself on having effected the
introduction, and proceeding in this character to give him (Lucien) the
benefit of his advice.

"Heaven send that Lucien might meet with
better treatment than he had done," such was the matter of M. du
Chatelet's discourse. "The Court was less insolent that this pack of
dolts in Angouleme. You were expected to endure deadly insults; the
superciliousness you had to put up with was something abominable. If
this kind of folk did not alter their behavior, there would be another
Revolution of '89. As for himself, if he continued to go to the house,
it was because he had found Mme. de Bargeton to his taste; she was the
only woman worth troubling about in Angouleme; he had been paying court
to her for want of anything better to do, and now he was desperately in
love with her. She would be his before very long, she loved him,
everything pointed that way. The conquest of this haughty queen of the
society would be his one revenge on the whole houseful of booby
clodpates."

Chatelet talked of his passion in the tone of a man
who would have a rival's life if he crossed his path. The elderly
butterfly of the Empire came down with his whole weight on the poor
poet, and tried to frighten and crush him by his self-importance. He
grew taller as he gave an embellished account of his perilous
wanderings; but while he impressed the poet's imagination, the lover
was by no means afraid of him.

In spite of the elderly coxcomb,
and regardless of his threats and airs of a _bourgeois_ bravo, Lucien
went back again and again to the house--not too often at first, as
became a man of L'Houmeau; but before very long he grew accustomed to
the vast condescension, as it had seemed to him at the outset, and came
more and more frequently. The druggist's son was a completely
insignificant being. If any of the _noblesse_, men or women, calling
upon Nais, found Lucien in the room, they met him with the overwhelming
graciousness that well-bred people use towards their inferiors. Lucien
thought them very kind for a time, and later found out the real reason
for their specious amiability. It was not long before he detected a
patronizing tone that stirred his gall and confirmed him in his bitter
Republicanism, a phase of opinion through which many a would-be
patrician passes by way of prelude to his introduction to polite
society.

But was there anything that he would not have endured
for Nais?--for so he heard her named by the clan. Like Spanish grandees
and the old Austrian nobility at Vienna, these folk, men and women
alike, called each other by their Christian names, a final shade of
distinction in the inmost ring of Angoumoisin aristocracy.

Lucien
loved Nais as a young man loves the first woman who flatters him, for
Nais prophesied great things and boundless fame for Lucien. She used
all her skill to secure her hold upon her poet; not merely did she
exalt him beyond measure, but she represented him to himself as a child
without fortune whom she meant to start in life; she treated him like a
child, to keep him near her; she made him her reader, her secretary,
and cared more for him than she would have thought possible after the
dreadful calamity that had befallen her.

She was very cruel to
herself in those days, telling herself that it would be folly to love a
young man of twenty, so far apart from her socially in the first place;
and her behavior to him was a bewildering mixture of familiarity and
capricious fits of pride arising from her fears and scruples. She was
sometimes a lofty patroness, sometimes she was tender and flattered
him. At first, while he was overawed by her rank, Lucien experienced
the extremes of dread, hope, and despair, the torture of a first love,
that is beaten deep into the heart with the hammer strokes of alternate
bliss and anguish. For two months Mme. de Bargeton was for him a
benefactress who would take a mother's interest in him; but confidences
came next. Mme. de Bargeton began to address her poet as "dear Lucien,"
and then as "dear," without more ado. The poet grew bolder, and
addressed the great lady as Nais, and there followed a flash of anger
that captivates a boy; she reproached him for calling her by a name in
everybody's mouth. The haughty and high-born Negrepelisse offered the
fair angel youth that one of her appellations which was unsoiled by
use; for him she would be "Louise." Lucien was in the third heaven.

One
evening when Lucien came in, he found Mme. de Bargeton looking at a
portrait, which she promptly put away. He wished to see it, and to
quiet the despair of a first fit of jealousy Louise showed him
Cante-Croix's picture, and told with tears the piteous story of a love
so stainless, so cruelly cut short. Was she experimenting with herself?
Was she trying a first unfaithfulness to the memory of the dead? Or had
she taken it into her head to raise up a rival to Lucien in the
portrait? Lucien was too much of a boy to analyze his lady-love; he
gave way to unfeigned despair when she opened the campaign by
entrenching herself behind the more or less skilfully devised scruples
which women raise to have them battered down. When a woman begins to
talk about her duty, regard for appearances or religion, the objections
she raises are so many redoubts which she loves to have carried by
storm. But on the guileless Lucien these coquetries were thrown away;
he would have advanced of his own accord.

"_I_ shall not die for
you, I will live for you," he cried audaciously one evening; he meant
to have no more of M. de Cante-Croix, and gave Louise a glance which
told plainly that a crisis was at hand.

Startled at the progress
of this new love in herself and her poet, Louise demanded some verses
promised for the first page of her album, looking for a pretext for a
quarrel in his tardiness. But what became of her when she read the
following stanzas, which, naturally, she considered finer than the
finest work of Canalis, the poet of the aristocracy?--

The
magic brush, light flying flights of song-- To these, but not to these
alone, belong My pages fair; Often to me, my mistress' pencil steals To
tell the secret gladness that she feels, The hidden care.

And
when her fingers, slowlier at the last, Of a rich Future, now become
the Past, Seek count of me, Oh Love, when swift, thick-coming memories
rise, I pray of Thee. May they bring visions fair as cloudless skies Of
happy voyage o'er a summer sea!

"Was it really I who inspired those lines?" she asked.

The
doubt suggested by coquetry to a woman who amused herself by playing
with fire brought tears to Lucien's eyes; but her first kiss upon his
forehead calmed the storm. Decidedly Lucien was a great man, and she
meant to form him; she thought of teaching him Italian and German and
perfecting his manners. That would be pretext sufficient for having him
constantly with her under the very eyes of her tiresome courtiers. What
an interest in her life! She took up music again for her poet's sake,
and revealed the world of sound to him, playing grand fragments of
Beethoven till she sent him into ecstasy; and, happy in his delight,
turned to the half-swooning poet.

"Is not such happiness as this enough?" she asked hypocritically; and
poor Lucien was stupid enough to answer, "Yes."

In
the previous week things had reached such a point, that Louise had
judged it expedient to ask Lucien to dine with M. de Bargeton as a
third. But in spite of this precaution, the whole town knew the state
of affairs; and so extraordinary did it appear, that no one would
believe the truth. The outcry was terrific. Some were of the opinion
that society was on the eve of cataclysm. "See what comes of Liberal
doctrines!" cried others.

Then it was that the jealous du
Chatelet discovered that Madame Charlotte, the monthly nurse, was no
other than Mme. Chardon, "the mother of the Chateaubriand of
L'Houmeau," as he put it. The remark passed muster as a joke. Mme. de
Chandour was the first to hurry to Mme. de Bargeton.

"Nais,
dear," she said, "do you know what everybody is talking about in
Angouleme? This little rhymster's mother is the Madame Charlotte who
nursed my sister-in-law through her confinement two months ago."

"What
is there extraordinary in that, my dear?" asked Mme. de Bargeton with
her most regal air. "She is a druggist's widow, is she not? A poor fate
for a Rubempre. Suppose that you and I had not a penny in the world,
what should either of us do for a living? How would you support your
children?"

Mme. de Bargeton's presence of mind put an end to the
jeremiads of the _noblesse_. Great natures are prone to make a virtue
of misfortune; and there is something irresistibly attractive about
well-doing when persisted in through evil report; innocence has the
piquancy of the forbidden.

Mme. de Bargeton's rooms were crowded
that evening with friends who came to remonstrate with her. She brought
her most caustic wit into play. She said that as noble families could
not produce a Moliere, a Racine, a Rousseau, a Voltaire, a Massillon, a
Beaumarchais, or a Diderot, people must make up their minds to it, and
accept the fact that great men had upholsterers and clockmakers and
cutlers for their fathers. She said that genius was always noble. She
railed at boorish squires for understanding their real interests so
imperfectly. In short, she talked a good deal of nonsense, which would
have let the light into heads less dense, but left her audience agape
at her eccentricity. And in these ways she conjured away the storm with
her heavy artillery.

When Lucien, obedient to her request,
appeared for the first time in the faded great drawing-room, where the
whist-tables were set out, she welcomed him graciously, and brought him
forward, like a queen who means to be obeyed. She addressed the
controller of excise as "M. Chatelet," and left that gentleman
thunderstruck by the discovery that she knew about the illegal
superfetation of the particle. Lucien was forced upon her circle, and
was received as a poisonous element, which every person in it vowed to
expel with the antidote of insolence.

Nais had won a victory,
but she had lost her supremacy of empire. There was a rumor of
insurrection. Amelie, otherwise Mme. de Chandour, harkening to "M.
Chatelet's" counsels, determined to erect a rival altar by receiving on
Wednesdays. Now Mme. de Bargeton's salon was open every evening; and
those who frequented it were so wedded to their ways, so accustomed to
meet about the same tables, to play the familiar game of backgammon, to
see the same faces and the same candle sconces night after night; and
afterwards to cloak and shawl, and put on overshoes and hats in the old
corridor, that they were quite as much attached to the steps of the
staircase as to the mistress of the house.

"All resigned
themselves to endure the songster" (_chardonneret_) "of the sacred
grove," said Alexandre de Brebian, which was witticism number two.
Finally, the president of the agricultural society put an end to the
sedition by remarking judicially that "before the Revolution the
greatest nobles admitted men like Dulcos and Grimm and Crebillon to
their society--men who were nobodies, like this little poet of
L'Houmeau; but one thing they never did, they never received
tax-collectors, and, after all, Chatelet is only a tax-collector."

Du
Chatelet suffered for Chardon. Every one turned the cold shoulder upon
him; and Chatelet was conscious that he was attacked. When Mme. de
Bargeton called him "M. Chatelet," he swore to himself that he would
possess her; and now he entered into the views of the mistress of the
house, came to the support of the young poet, and declared himself
Lucien's friend. The great diplomatist, overlooked by the shortsighted
Emperor, made much of Lucien, and declared himself his friend! To
launch the poet into society, he gave a dinner, and asked all the
authorities to meet him--the prefect, the receiver-general, the colonel
in command of the garrison, the head of the Naval School, the president
of the Court, and so forth. The poet, poor fellow, was feted so
magnificently, and so belauded, that anybody but a young man of
two-and-twenty would have shrewdly suspected a hoax. After dinner,
Chatelet drew his rival on to recite _The Dying Sardanapalus_, the
masterpiece of the hour; and the headmaster of the school, a man of a
phlegmatic temperament, applauded with both hands, and vowed that
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau had done nothing finer. Sixte, Baron du
Chatelet, thought in his heart that this slip of a rhymster would
wither incontinently in a hothouse of adulation; perhaps he hoped that
when the poet's head was turned with brilliant dreams, he would indulge
in some impertinence that would promptly consign him to the obscurity
from which he had emerged. Pending the decease of genius, Chatelet
appeared to offer up his hopes as a sacrifice at Mme. de Bargeton's
feet; but with the ingenuity of a rake, he kept his own plan in
abeyance, watching the lovers' movements with keenly critical eyes, and
waiting for the opportunity of ruining Lucien.

From this time
forward, vague rumors reported the existence of a great man in
Angoumois. Mme. de Bargeton was praised on all sides for the interest
which she took in this young eagle. No sooner was her conduct approved
than she tried to win a general sanction. She announced a soiree, with
ices, tea, and cakes, a great innovation in a city where tea, as yet,
was sold only by druggists as a remedy for indigestion. The flower of
Angoumoisin aristocracy was summoned to hear Lucien read his great
work. Louise had hidden all the difficulties from her friend, but she
let fall a few words touching the social cabal formed against him; she
would not have him ignorant of the perils besetting his career as a man
of genius, nor of the obstacles insurmountable to weaklings. She drew a
lesson from the recent victory. Her white hands pointed him to glory
that lay beyond a prolonged martyrdom; she spoke of stakes and flaming
pyres; she spread the adjectives thickly on her finest _tartines_, and
decorated them with a variety of her most pompous epithets. It was an
infringement of the copyright of the passages of declamation that
disfigure _Corinne_; but Louise grew so much the greater in her own
eyes as she talked, that she loved the Benjamin who inspired her
eloquence the more for it. She counseled him to take a bold step and
renounce his patronymic for the noble name of Rubempre; he need not
mind the little tittle-tattle over a change which the King, for that
matter, would authorize. Mme. de Bargeton undertook to procure this
favor; she was related to the Marquise d'Espard, who was a
Blamont-Chauvry before her marriage, and a _persona grata_ at Court.
The words "King," "Marquise d'Espard," and "the Court" dazzled Lucien
like a blaze of fireworks, and the necessity of the baptism was plain
to him.

"Dear child," said Louise, with tender mockery in her tones, "the
sooner it is done, the sooner it will be sanctioned."

She
went through social strata and showed the poet that this step would
raise him many rungs higher in the ladder. Seizing the moment, she
persuaded Lucien to forswear the chimerical notions of '89 as to
equality; she roused a thirst for social distinction allayed by David's
cool commonsense; she pointed out fashionable society as the goal and
the only stage for such a talent as his. The rabid Liberal became a
Monarchist _in petto_; Lucien set his teeth in the apple of desire of
rank, luxury, and fame. He swore to win a crown to lay at his lady's
feet, even if there should be blood-stains on the bays. He would
conquer at any cost, _quibuscumque viis_. To prove his courage, he told
her of his present way of life; Louise had known nothing of its
hardships, for there is an indefinable pudency inseparable from strong
feeling in youth, a delicacy which shrinks from a display of great
qualities; and a young man loves to have the real quality of his nature
discerned through the incognito. He described that life, the shackles
of poverty borne with pride, his days of work for David, his nights of
study. His young ardor recalled memories of the colonel of
six-and-twenty; Mme. de Bargeton's eyes grew soft; and Lucien, seeing
this weakness in his awe-inspiring mistress, seized a hand that she had
abandoned to him, and kissed it with the frenzy of a lover and a poet
in his youth. Louise even allowed him to set his eager, quivering lips
upon her forehead.

"Oh, child! child! if any one should see us, I should look very
ridiculous," she said, shaking off the ecstatic torpor.

In
the course of that evening, Mme. de Bargeton's wit made havoc of
Lucien's prejudices, as she styled them. Men of genius, according to
her doctrine, had neither brothers nor sisters nor father nor mother;
the great tasks laid upon them required that they should sacrifice
everything that they might grow to their full stature. Perhaps their
families might suffer at first from the all-absorbing exactions of a
giant brain, but at a later day they were repaid a hundredfold for
self-denial of every kind during the early struggles of the kingly
intellect with adverse fate; they shared the spoils of victory. Genius
was answerable to no man. Genius alone could judge of the means used to
an end which no one else could know. It was the duty of a man of
genius, therefore, to set himself above law; it was his mission to
reconstruct law; the man who is master of his age may take all that he
needs, run any risks, for all is his. She quoted instances. Bernard
Palissy, Louis XI., Fox, Napoleon, Christopher Columbus, and Julius
Caesar,--all these world-famous gamblers had begun life hampered with
debt, or as poor men; all of them had been misunderstood, taken for
madmen, reviled for bad sons, bad brothers, bad fathers; and yet in
after life each one had come to be the pride of his family, of his
country, of the civilized world.

Her arguments fell upon fertile
soil in the worst of Lucien's nature, and spread corruption in his
heart; for him, when his desires were hot, all means were admissible.
But--failure is high treason against society; and when the fallen
conqueror has run amuck through _bourgeois_ virtues, and pulled down
the pillars of society, small wonder that society, finding Marius
seated among the ruins, should drive him forth in abhorrence. All
unconsciously Lucien stood with the palm of genius on the one hand and
a shameful ending in the hulks upon the other; and, on high upon the
Sinai of the prophets, beheld no Dead Sea covering the cities of the
plain--the hideous winding-sheet of Gomorrah.

So well did Louise
loosen the swaddling-bands of provincial life that confined the heart
and brain of her poet that the said poet determined to try an
experiment upon her. He wished to feel certain that this proud conquest
was his without laying himself open to the mortification of a rebuff.
The forthcoming soiree gave him his opportunity. Ambition blended with
his love. He loved, and he meant to rise, a double desire not unnatural
in young men with a heart to satisfy and the battle of life to fight.
Society, summoning all her children to one banquet, arouses ambition in
the very morning of life. Youth is robbed of its charm, and generous
thoughts are corrupted by mercenary scheming. The idealist would fain
have it otherwise, but intrusive fact too often gives the lie to the
fiction which we should like to believe, making it impossible to paint
the young man of the nineteenth century other than he is. Lucien
imagined that his scheming was entirely prompted by good feeling, and
persuaded himself that it was done solely for his friend David's sake.

He
wrote a long letter to his Louise; he felt bolder, pen in hand, than
face to face. In a dozen sheets, copied out three several times, he
told her of his father's genius and blighted hopes and of his grinding
poverty. He described his beloved sister as an angel, and David as
another Cuvier, a great man of the future, and a father, friend, and
brother to him in the present. He should feel himself unworthy of his
Louise's love (his proudest distinction) if he did not ask her to do
for David all that she had done for him. He would give up everything
rather than desert David Sechard; David must witness his success. It
was one of those wild letters in which a young man points a pistol at a
refusal, letters full of boyish casuistry and the incoherent reasoning
of an idealist; a delicious tissue of words embroidered here and there
by the naive utterances that women love so well--unconscious
revelations of the writer's heart.

Lucien left the letter with
the housemaid, went to the office, and spent the day in reading proofs,
superintending the execution of orders, and looking after the affairs
of the printing-house. He said not a word to David. While youth bears a
child's heart, it is capable of sublime reticence. Perhaps, too, Lucien
began to dread the Phocion's axe which David could wield when he chose,
perhaps he was afraid to meet those clear-sighted eyes that read the
depths of his soul. But when he read Chenier's poems with David, his
secret rose from his heart to his lips at the sting of a reproach that
he felt as the patient feels the probing of a wound.

And
now try to understand the thoughts that troubled Lucien's mind as he
went down from Angouleme. Was the great lady angry with him? Would she
receive David? Had he, Lucien, in his ambition, flung himself headlong
back into the depths of L'Houmeau? Before he set that kiss on Louise's
forehead, he had had time to measure the distance between a queen and
her favorite, so far had he come in five months, and he did not tell
himself that David could cross over the same ground in a moment. Yet he
did not know how completely the lower orders were excluded from this
upper world; he did not so much as suspect that a second experiment of
this kind meant ruin for Mme. de Bargeton. Once accused and fairly
convicted of a liking for _canaille_, Louise would be driven from the
place, her caste would shun her as men shunned a leper in the Middle
Ages. Nais might have broken the moral law, and her whole circle, the
clergy and the flower of the aristocracy, would have defended her
against the world through thick and then; but a breach of another law,
the offence of admitting all sorts of people to her house --this was
sin without remission. The sins of those in power are always
overlooked--once let them abdicate, and they shall pay the penalty. And
what was it but abdication to receive David?

But if Lucien did
not see these aspects of the question, his aristocratic instinct
discerned plenty of difficulties of another kind, and he took alarm. A
fine manner is not the invariable outcome of noble feeling; and while
no man at court had a nobler air than Racine, Corneille looked very
much like a cattle-dealer, and Descartes might have been taken for an
honest Dutch merchant; and visitors to La Brede, meeting Montesquieu in
a cotton nightcap, carrying a rake over his shoulder, mistook him for a
gardener. A knowledge of the world, when it is not sucked in with
mother's milk and part of the inheritance of descent, is only acquired
by education, supplemented by certain gifts of chance--a graceful
figure, distinction of feature, a certain ring in the voice. All these,
so important trifles, David lacked, while Nature had bestowed them upon
his friend. Of gentle blood on the mother's side, Lucien was a Frank,
even down to the high-arched instep. David had inherited the physique
of his father the pressman and the flat foot of the Gael. Lucien could
hear the shower of jokes at David's expense; he could see Mme. de
Bargeton's repressed smile; and at length, without being exactly
ashamed of his brother, he made up his mind to disregard his first
impulse and to think twice before yielding to it in future.

So,
after the hour of poetry and self-sacrifice, after the reading of verse
that opened out before the friends the fields of literature in the
light of a newly-risen sun, the hour of worldly wisdom and of scheming
struck for Lucien.

Down once more in L'Houmeau he wished that he
had not written that letter; he wished he could have it back again; for
down the vista of the future he caught a glimpse of the inexorable laws
of the world. He guessed that nothing succeeds like success, and it
cost him something to step down from the first rung of the scaling
ladder by which he meant to reach and storm the heights above. Pictures
of his quiet and simple life rose before him, pictures fair with the
brightest colors of blossoming love. There was David; what a genius
David had--David who had helped him so generously, and would die for
him at need; he thought of his mother, of how great a lady she was in
her lowly lot, and how she thought that he was as good as he was
clever; then of his sister so gracious in submission to her fate, of
his own innocent childhood and conscience as yet unstained, of budding
hopes undespoiled by rough winds, and at these thoughts the past broke
into flowers once more for his memory.

Then he told himself that
it was a far finer thing to hew his own way through serried hostile
mobs of aristocrats or philistines by repeated successful strokes, than
to reach the goal through a woman's favor. Sooner or later his genius
should shine out; it had been so with the others, his predecessors;
they had tamed society. Women would love him when that day came! The
example of Napoleon, which, unluckily for this nineteenth century of
ours, has filled a great many ordinary persons with aspirations after
extraordinary destinies,--the example of Napoleon occurred to Lucien's
mind. He flung his schemes to the winds and blamed himself for thinking
of them. For Lucien was so made that he went from evil to good, or from
good to evil, with the same facility.

Lucien had none of the
scholar's love for his retreat; for the past month indeed he had felt
something like shame at the sight of the shop front, where you could
read--

POSTEL (LATE CHARDON), PHARMACEUTICAL CHEMIST,

in
yellow letters on a green ground. It was an offence to him that his
father's name should be thus posted up in a place where every carriage
passed.

Every evening, when he closed the ugly iron gate and
went up to Beaulieu to give his arm to Mme. de Bargeton among the
dandies of the upper town, he chafed beyond all reason at the disparity
between his lodging and his fortune.

"I love Mme. de Bargeton;
perhaps in a few days she will be mine, yet here I live in this
rat-hole!" he said to himself this evening, as he went down the narrow
passage into the little yard behind the shop. This evening bundles of
boiled herbs were spread out along the wall, the apprentice was
scouring a caldron, and M. Postel himself, girded about with his
laboratory apron, was standing with a retort in his hand, inspecting
some chemical product while keeping an eye upon the shop door, or if
the eye happened to be engaged, he had at any rate an ear for the bell.

A
strong scent of camomile and peppermint pervaded the yard and the poor
little dwelling at the side, which you reached by a short ladder, with
a rope on either side by way of hand-rail. Lucien's room was an attic
just under the roof.

"Good-day, sonny," said M. Postel, that
typical, provincial tradesman. "Are you pretty middling? I have just
been experimenting on treacle, but it would take a man like your father
to find what I am looking for. Ah! he was a famous chemist, he was! If
I had only known his gout specific, you and I should be rolling along
in our carriage this day."

The little druggist, whose head was
as thick as his heart was kind, never let a week pass without some
allusion to Chardon senior's unlucky secretiveness as to that
discovery, words that Lucien felt like a stab.

"It is a great
pity," Lucien answered curtly. He was beginning to think his father's
apprentice prodigiously vulgar, though he had blessed the man for his
kindness, for honest Postel had helped his master's widow and children
more than once.

"Why, what is the matter with you?" M. Postel inquired, putting down
his test tube on the laboratory table.

"Is there a letter for me?"

"Yes, a letter that smells like balm! it is lying on the corner near my
desk."

Mme. de Bargeton's letter lying among the physic bottles in a
druggist's shop! Lucien sprang in to rescue it.

"Be
quick, Lucien! your dinner has been waiting an hour for you, it will be
cold!" a sweet voice called gently through a half-opened window; but
Lucien did not hear.

"That brother of yours has gone crazy, mademoiselle," said Postel,
lifting his face.

The
old bachelor looked rather like a miniature brandy cask, embellished by
a painter's fancy, with a fat, ruddy countenance much pitted with the
smallpox; at the sight of Eve his face took a ceremonious and amiable
expression, which said plainly that he had thoughts of espousing the
daughter of his predecessor, but could not put an end to the strife
between love and interest in his heart. He often said to Lucien, with a
smile, "Your sister is uncommonly pretty, and you are not so bad
looking neither! Your father did everything well."

Eve was tall,
dark-haired, dark of complexion, and blue-eyed; but notwithstanding
these signs of virile character, she was gentle, tender-hearted, and
devoted to those she loved. Her frank innocence, her simplicity, her
quiet acceptance of a hard-working life, her character--for her life
was above reproach--could not fail to win David Sechard's heart. So,
since the first time that these two had met, a repressed and
single-hearted love had grown up between them in the German fashion,
quietly, with no fervid protestations. In their secret souls they
thought of each other as if there were a bar between that kept them
apart; as if the thought were an offence against some jealous husband;
and hid their feelings from Lucien as though their love in some way did
him a wrong. David, moreover, had no confidence in himself, and could
not believe that Eve could care for him; Eve was a penniless girl, and
therefore shy. A real work-girl would have been bolder; but Eve, gently
bred, and fallen into poverty, resigned herself to her dreary lot.
Diffident as she seemed, she was in reality proud, and would not make a
single advance towards the son of a father said to be rich. People who
knew the value of a growing property, said that the vineyard at Marsac
was worth more than eighty thousand francs, to say nothing of the
traditional bits of land which old Sechard used to buy as they came
into the market, for old Sechard had savings--he was lucky with his
vintages, and a clever salesman. Perhaps David was the only man in
Angouleme who knew nothing of his father's wealth. In David's eyes
Marsac was a hovel bought in 1810 for fifteen or sixteen thousand
francs, a place that he saw once a year at vintage time when his father
walked him up and down among the vines and boasted of an output of wine
which the young printer never saw, and he cared nothing about it.

David
was a student leading a solitary life; and the love that gained even
greater force in solitude, as he dwelt upon the difficulties in the
way, was timid, and looked for encouragement; for David stood more in
awe of Eve than a simple clerk of some high-born lady. He was awkward
and ill at ease in the presence of his idol, and as eager to hurry away
as he had been to come. He repressed his passion, and was silent. Often
of an evening, on some pretext of consulting Lucien, he would leave the
Place du Murier and go down through the Palet Gate as far as L'Houmeau,
but at the sight of the green iron railings his heart failed. Perhaps
he had come too late, Eve might think him a nuisance; she would be in
bed by this time no doubt; and so he turned back. But though his great
love had only appeared in trifles, Eve read it clearly; she was proud,
without a touch of vanity in her pride, of the deep reverence in
David's looks and words and manner towards her, but it was the young
printer's enthusiastic belief in Lucien that drew her to him most of
all. He had divined the way to win Eve. The mute delights of this love
of theirs differed from the transports of stormy passion, as
wildflowers in the fields from the brilliant flowers in garden beds.
Interchange of glances, delicate and sweet as blue water-flowers on the
surface of the stream; a look in either face, vanishing as swiftly as
the scent of briar-rose; melancholy, tender as the velvet of
moss--these were the blossoms of two rare natures, springing up out of
a rich and fruitful soil on foundations of rock. Many a time Eve had
seen revelations of the strength that lay below the appearance of
weakness, and made such full allowance for all that David left undone,
that the slightest word now might bring about a closer union of soul
and soul.

Eve opened the door, and Lucien sat down without a
word at the little table on an X-shaped trestle. There was no
tablecloth; the poor little household boasted but three silver spoons
and forks, and Eve had laid them all for the dearly loved brother.

"What
have you there?" she asked, when she had set a dish on the table, and
put the extinguisher on the portable stove, where it had been kept hot
for him.

Lucien did not answer. Eve took up a little plate,
daintily garnished with vine-leaves, and set it on the table with a jug
full of cream.

"There, Lucien, I have had strawberries for you."

But
Lucien was so absorbed in his letter that he did not hear a word. Eve
came to sit beside him without a murmur; for in a sister's love for a
brother it is an element of great pleasure to be treated without
ceremony.

"Oh! what is it?" she cried as she saw tears shining in her brother's
eyes.

"Nothing,
nothing, Eve," he said, and putting his arm about her waist, he drew
her towards him and kissed her forehead, her hair, her throat, with
warmth that surprised her.

"You are keeping something from me."

"Well, then--she loves me."

"I knew very well that you kissed me for somebody else," the poor
sister pouted, flushing red.

"We shall all be happy," cried Lucien, swallowing great spoonfuls of
soup.

"_We_?"
echoed Eve. The same presentiment that had crossed David's mind
prompted her to add, "You will not care so much about us now."

"How can you think that, if you know me?"

Eve
put out her hand and grasped his tightly; then she carried off the
empty plate and the brown earthen soup-tureen, and brought the dish
that she had made for him. But instead of eating his dinner, Lucien
read his letter over again; and Eve, discreet maiden, did not ask
another question, respecting her brother's silence. If he wished to
tell her about it, she could wait; if he did not, how could she ask him
to tell her? She waited. Here is the letter:--

"MY FRIEND,--Why
should I refuse to your brother in science the help that I have lent
you? All merits have equal rights in my eyes; but you do not know the
prejudices of those among whom I live. We shall never make an
aristocracy of ignorance understand that intellect ennobles. If I have
not sufficient influence to compel them to accept M. David Sechard, I
am quite willing to sacrifice the worthless creatures to you. It would
be a perfect hecatomb in the antique manner. But, dear friend, you
would not, of course, ask me to leave them all in exchange for the
society of a person whose character and manner might not please me. I
know from your flatteries how easily friendship can be blinded. Will
you think the worse of me if I attach a condition to my consent? In the
interests of your future I should like to see your friend, and know and
decide for myself whether you are not mistaken. What is this but the
mother's anxious care of my dear poet, which I am in duty bound to take?

"LOUISE DE NEGREPELISSE."

Lucien had no suspicion of the art with which polite society puts
forward a "Yes" on the way to a "No," and a "No" that leads to a "Yes."
He took this note for a victory. David should go to Mme. de Bargeton's
house! David would shine there in all the majesty of his genius! He
raised his head so proudly in the intoxication of a victory which
increased his belief in himself and his ascendency over others, his
face was so radiant with the brightness of many hopes, that his sister
could not help telling him that he looked handsome.

"If that
woman has any sense, she must love you! And if so, to-night she will be
vexed, for all the ladies will try all sorts of coquetries on you. How
handsome you will look when you read your _Saint John in Patmos_! If
only I were a mouse, and could just slip in and see it! Come, I have
put your clothes out in mother's room."

The mother's room bore
witness to self-respecting poverty. There were white curtains to the
walnut wood bedstead, and a strip of cheap green carpet at the foot. A
chest of drawers with a wooden top, a looking-glass, and a few walnut
wood chairs completed the furniture. The clock on the chimney-piece
told of the old vanished days of prosperity. White curtains hung in the
windows, a gray flowered paper covered the walls, and the tiled floor,
colored and waxed by Eve herself, shone with cleanliness. On the little
round table in the middle of the room stood a red tray with a pattern
of gilt roses, and three cups and a sugar-basin of Limoges porcelain.
Eve slept in the little adjoining closet, where there was just room for
a narrow bed, an old-fashioned low chair, and a work-table by the
window; there was about as much space as there is in a ship's cabin,
and the door always stood open for the sake of air. But if all these
things spoke of great poverty, the atmosphere was sedate and studious;
and for those who knew the mother and children, there was something
touchingly appropriate in their surroundings.

Lucien was tying
his cravat when David's step sounded outside in the little yard, and in
another moment the young printer appeared. From his manner and looks he
seemed to have come down in a hurry.

"No,"
David said with some confusion, "I came down to thank you for this
proof of friendship, but I have been thinking things over seriously. My
own life is cut out for me, Lucien. I am David Sechard, printer to His
Majesty in Angouleme, with my name at the bottom of the bills posted on
every wall. For people of that class, I am an artisan, or I am in
business, if you like it better, but I am a craftsman who lives over a
shop in the Rue de Beaulieu at the corner of the Place du Murier. I
have not the wealth of a Keller just yet, nor the name of a Desplein,
two sorts of power that the nobles still try to ignore, and --I am so
far agreed with them--this power is nothing without a knowledge of the
world and the manners of a gentleman. How am I to prove my claim to
this sudden elevation? I should only make myself a laughing-stock for
nobles and _bourgeoisie_ to boot. As for you, your position is
different. A foreman is not committed to anything. You are busy gaining
knowledge that will be indispensable by and by; you can explain your
present work by your future. And, in any case, you can leave your place
to-morrow and begin something else; you might study law or diplomacy,
or go into civil service. Nobody had docketed and pigeon-holed _you_,
in fact. Take advantage of your social maiden fame to walk alone and
grasp honors. Enjoy all pleasures gladly, even frivolous pleasures. I
wish you luck, Lucien; I shall enjoy your success; you will be like a
second self for me. Yes, in my own thoughts I shall live your life. You
shall have the holiday life, in the glare of the world and among the
swift working springs of intrigue. I will lead the work-a-day life, the
tradesman's life of sober toil, and the patient labor of scientific
research.

"You shall be our aristocracy," he went on, looking at
Eve as he spoke. "If you totter, you shall have my arm to steady you.
If you have reason to complain of the treachery of others, you will
find a refuge in our hearts, the love there will never change. And
influence and favor and the goodwill of others might fail us if we were
two; we should stand in each other's way; go forward, you can tow me
after you if it comes to that. So far from envying you, I will dedicate
my life to yours. The thing that you have just done for me, when you
risked the loss of your benefactress, your love it may be, rather than
forsake or disown me, that little thing, so great as it was--ah, well,
Lucien, that in itself would bind me to you forever if we were not
brothers already. Have no remorse, no concern over seeming to take the
larger share. This one-sided bargain is exactly to my taste. And, after
all, suppose that you should give me a pang now and again, who knows
that I shall not still be your debtor all my life long?"

He looked timidly towards Eve as he spoke; her eyes were full of tears,
she saw all that lay below the surface.

"In
fact," he went on, turning to Lucien, who stood amazed at this, "you
are well made, you have a graceful figure, you wear your clothes with
an air, you look like a gentleman in that blue coat of yours with the
yellow buttons and the plain nankeen trousers; now I should look like a
workingman among those people, I should be awkward and out of my
element, I should say foolish things, or say nothing at all; but as for
you, you can overcome any prejudice as to names by taking your
mother's; you can call yourself Lucien de Rubempre; I am and always
shall be David Sechard. In this society that you frequent, everything
tells for you, everything would tell against me. You were born to shine
in it. Women will worship that angel face of yours; won't they, Eve?"

Lucien
sprang up and flung his arms about David. David's humility had made
short work of many doubts and plenty of difficulties. Was it possible
not to feel twice tenderly towards this friend, who by the way of
friendship had come to think the very thoughts that he, Lucien, had
reached through ambition? The aspirant for love and honors felt that
the way had been made smooth for him; the young man and the comrade
felt all his heart go out towards his friend.

It was one of
those moments that come very seldom in our lives, when all the forces
in us are sweetly strung, and every chord vibrating gives out full
resonance.

And yet, this goodness of a noble nature increased
Lucien's human tendency to take himself as the centre of things. Do not
all of us say more or less, "_L'Etat, c'est moi!_" with Louis Quatorze?
Lucien's mother and sister had concentrated all their tenderness on
him, David was his devoted friend; he was accustomed to see the three
making every effort for him in secret, and consequently he had all the
faults of a spoiled eldest son. The noble is eaten up with the egoism
which their unselfishness was fostering in Lucien; and Mme. de Bargeton
was doing her best to develop the same fault by inciting him to forget
all that he owed to his sister, and mother, and David. He was far from
doing so as yet; but was there not ground for the fear that as his
sphere of ambition widened, his whole thought perforce would be how he
might maintain himself in it?

When emotion had subsided, David
had a suggestion to make. He thought that Lucien's poem, _Saint John in
Patmos_, was possibly too biblical to be read before an audience but
little familiar with apocalyptic poetry. Lucien, making his first
appearance before the most exacting public in the Charente, seemed to
be nervous. David advised him to take Andre de Chenier and substitute
certain pleasure for a dubious delight. Lucien was a perfect reader,
the listeners would enjoy listening to him, and his modesty would
doubtless serve him well. Like most young people, the pair were
endowing the rest of the world with their own intelligence and virtues;
for if youth that has not yet gone astray is pitiless for the sins of
others, it is ready, on the other hand, to put a magnificent faith in
them. It is only, in fact, after a good deal of experience of life that
we recognize the truth of Raphael's great saying--"To comprehend is to
equal."

The power of appreciating poetry is rare, generally
speaking, in France; _esprit_ soon dries up the source of the sacred
tears of ecstasy; nobody cares to be at the trouble of deciphering the
sublime, of plumbing the depths to discover the infinite. Lucien was
about to have his first experience of the ignorance and indifference of
worldlings. He went round by way of the printing office for David's
volume of poetry.

The two lovers were left alone, and David had
never felt more embarrassed in his life. Countless terrors seized upon
him; he half wished, half feared that Eve would praise him; he longed
to run away, for even modesty is not exempt from coquetry. David was
afraid to utter a word that might seem to beg for thanks; everything
that he could think of put him in some false position, so he held his
tongue and looked guilty. Eve, guessing the agony of modesty, was
enjoying the pause; but when David twisted his hat as if he meant to
go, she looked at him and smiled.

"Monsieur David," she said,
"if you are not going to pass the evening at Mme. de Bargeton's, we can
spend the time together. It is fine; shall we take a walk along the
Charente? We will have a talk about Lucien."

David longed to
fling himself at the feet of this delicious girl. Eve had rewarded him
beyond his hopes by that tone in her voice; the kindness of her accent
had solved the difficulties of the position, her suggestion was
something better than praise; it was the first grace given by love.

"But give me time to dress!" she said, as David made as if to go at
once.

David
went out; he who all his life long had not known one tune from another,
was humming to himself; honest Postel hearing him with surprise,
conceived a vehement suspicion of Eve's feelings towards the printer.

The
most trifling things that happened that evening made a great impression
on Lucien, and his character was peculiarly susceptible to first
impressions. Like all inexperienced lovers he arrived so early that
Louise was not in the drawing-room; but M. de Bargeton was there,
alone. Lucien had already begun to serve his apprenticeship in the
practice of the small deceits with which the lover of a married woman
pays for his happiness--deceits through which, moreover, she learns the
extent of her power; but so far Lucien had not met the lady's husband
face to face.

M. de Bargeton's intellect was of the limited
kind, exactly poised on the border line between harmless vacancy, with
some glimmerings of sense, and the excessive stupidity that can neither
take in nor give out any idea. He was thoroughly impressed with the
idea of doing his duty in society; and, doing his utmost to be
agreeable, had adopted the smile of an opera dancer as his sole method
of expression. Satisfied, he smiled; dissatisfied, he smiled again. He
smiled at good news and evil tidings; with slight modifications the
smile did duty on all occasions. If he was positively obliged to
express his personal approval, a complacent laugh reinforced the smile;
but he never vouchsafed a word until driven to the last extremity. A
_tete-a-tete_ put him in the one embarrassment of his vegetative
existence, for then he was obliged to look for something to say in the
vast blank of his vacant interior. He usually got out of the difficulty
by a return to the artless ways of childhood; he thought aloud, took
you into his confidence concerning the smallest details of his
existence, his physical wants, the small sensations which did duty for
ideas with him. He never talked about the weather, nor did he indulge
in the ordinary commonplaces of conversation--the way of escape
provided for weak intellects; he plunged you into the most intimate and
personal topics.

"I took veal this morning to please Mme. de
Bargeton, who is very fond of veal, and my stomach has been very uneasy
since," he would tell you. "I knew how it would be; it never suits me.
How do you explain it?" Or, very likely--

"I am just about to ring for a glass of _eau sucree_; will you have
some at the same time?"

Or, "I am going to take a ride to-morrow; I am going over to see my
father-in-law."

These
short observations did not permit of discussion; a "Yes" or "No,"
extracted from his interlocutor, the conversation dropped dead. Then M.
de Bargeton mutely implored his visitor to come to his assistance.
Turning westward his old asthmatic pug-dog countenance, he gazed at you
with big, lustreless eyes, in a way that said, "You were saying?"

The
people whom he loved best were bores anxious to talk about themselves;
he listened to them with an unfeigned and delicate interest which so
endeared him to the species that all the twaddlers of Angouleme
credited M. de Bargeton with more understanding than he chose to show,
and were of the opinion that he was underrated. So it happened that
when these persons could find nobody else to listen to them, they went
off to give M. de Bargeton the benefit of the rest of the story,
argument, or what not, sure beforehand of his eulogistic smile. Madame
de Bargeton's rooms were always crowded, and generally her husband felt
quite at ease. He interested himself in the smallest details; he
watched those who came in and bowed and smiled, and brought the new
arrivals to his wife; he lay in wait for departing visitors, and went
with them to the door, taking leave of them with that eternal smile.
When conversation grew lively, and he saw that every one was interested
in one thing or another, he stood, happy and mute, planted like a swan
on both feet, listening, to all appearance, to a political discussion;
or he looked over the card-players' hands without a notion of what it
was all about, for he could not play at any game; or he walked about
and took snuff to promote digestion. Anais was the bright side of his
life; she made it unspeakably pleasant for him. Stretched out at full
length in his armchair, he watched admiringly while she did her part as
hostess, for she talked for him. It was a pleasure, too, to him to try
to see the point in her remarks; and as it was often a good while
before he succeeded, his smiles appeared after a delay, like the
explosion of a shell which has entered the earth and worked up again.
His respect for his wife, moreover, almost amounted to adoration. And
so long as we can adore, is there not happiness enough in life? Anais'
husband was as docile as a child who asks nothing better than to be
told what to do; and, generous and clever woman as she was, she had
taken no undue advantage of his weaknesses. She had taken care of him
as you take care of a cloak; she kept him brushed, neat, and tidy,
looked closely after him, and humored him; and humored, looked after,
brushed, kept tidy, and cared for, M. de Bargeton had come to feel an
almost dog-like affection for his wife. It is so easy to give happiness
that costs nothing! Mme. de Bargeton, knowing that her husband had no
pleasure but in good cheer, saw that he had good dinners; she had pity
upon him, she had never uttered a word of complaint; indeed, there were
people who could not understand that a woman might keep silence through
pride, and argued that M. de Bargeton must possess good qualities
hidden from public view. Mme. de Bargeton had drilled him into military
subordination; he yielded a passive obedience to his wife. "Go and call
on Monsieur So-and-So or Madame Such-an-One," she would say, and he
went forthwith, like a soldier at the word of command. He stood at
attention in her presence, and waited motionless for his orders.

There
was some talk about this time of nominating the mute gentleman for a
deputy. Lucien as yet had not lifted the veil which hid such an
unimaginable character; indeed, he had scarcely frequented the house
long enough. M. de Bargeton, spread at full length in his great chair,
appeared to see and understand all that was going on; his silence added
to his dignity, and his figure inspired Lucien with a prodigious awe.
It is the wont of imaginative natures to magnify everything, or to find
a soul to inhabit every shape; and Lucien took this gentleman, not for
a granite guard-post, but for a formidable sphinx, and thought it
necessary to conciliate him.

"I am the first comer," he said, bowing with more respect than people
usually showed the worthy man.

"That is natural enough," said M. de Bargeton.

Lucien
took the remark for an epigram; the lady's husband was jealous, he
thought; he reddened under it, looked in the glass and tried to give
himself a countenance.

"You live in L'Houmeau," said M. de
Bargeton, "and people who live a long way off always come earlier than
those who live near by."

"What is the reason of that?" asked Lucien politely.

"I don't know," answered M. de Bargeton, relapsing into immobility.

"You have not cared to find out," Lucien began again; "any one who
could make an observation could discover the cause."

"Ah!" said M. de Bargeton, "final causes! Eh! eh! . . ."

The conversation came to a dead stop; Lucien racked his brains to
resuscitate it.

"Mme. de Bargeton is dressing, no doubt," he began, shuddering at the
silliness of the question.

"Yes, she is dressing," her husband naturally answered.

Lucien
looked up at the ceiling and vainly tried to think of something else to
say. As his eyes wandered over the gray painted joists and the spaces
of plaster between, he saw, not without qualms, that the little
chandelier with the old-fashioned cut-glass pendants had been stripped
of its gauze covering and filled with wax candles. All the covers had
been removed from the furniture, and the faded flowered silk damask had
come to light. These preparations meant something extraordinary. The
poet looked at his boots, and misgivings about his costume arose in his
mind. Grown stupid with dismay, he turned and fixed his eyes on a
Japanese jar standing on a begarlanded console table of the time of
Louis Quinze; then, recollecting that he must conciliate Mme. de
Bargeton's husband, he tried to find out if the good gentleman had a
hobby of any sort in which he might be humored.

"You seldom leave the city, monsieur?" he began, returning to M. de
Bargeton.

"Very seldom."

Silence
again. M. de Bargeton watched Lucien's slightest movements like a
suspicious cat; the young man's presence disturbed him. Each was afraid
of the other.

"Can he feel suspicious of my attentions?" thought Lucien; "he seems to
be anything but friendly."

Lucien
was not a little embarrassed by the uneasy glances that the other gave
him as he went to and fro, when luckily for him, the old man-servant
(who wore livery for the occasion) announced "M. du Chatelet." The
Baron came in, very much at ease, greeted his friend Bargeton, and
favored Lucien with the little nod then in vogue, which the poet in his
mind called purse-proud impertinence.

Sixte du Chatelet appeared
in a pair of dazzling white trousers with invisible straps that kept
them in shape. He wore pumps and thread stockings; the black ribbon of
his eyeglass meandered over a white waistcoat, and the fashion and
elegance of Paris was strikingly apparent in his black coat. He was
indeed just the faded beau who might be expected from his antecedents,
though advancing years had already endowed him with a certain
waist-girth which somewhat exceeded the limits of elegance. He had dyed
the hair and whiskers grizzled by his sufferings during his travels,
and this gave a hard look to his face. The skin which had once been so
delicate had been tanned to the copper-red color of Europeans from
India; but in spite of his absurd pretensions to youth, you could still
discern traces of the Imperial Highness' charming private secretary in
du Chatelet's general appearance. He put up his eyeglass and stared at
his rival's nankeen trousers, at his boots, at his waistcoat, at the
blue coat made by the Angouleme tailor, he looked him over from head to
foot, in short, then he coolly returned his eyeglass to his waistcoat
pocket with a gesture that said, "I am satisfied." And Lucien, eclipsed
at this moment by the elegance of the inland revenue department,
thought that it would be his turn by and by, when he should turn a face
lighted up with poetry upon the assembly; but this prospect did not
prevent him from feeling the sharp pang that succeeded to the
uncomfortable sense of M. de Bargeton's imagined hostility. The Baron
seemed to bring all the weight of his fortune to bear upon him, the
better to humiliate him in his poverty. M. de Bargeton had counted on
having no more to say, and his soul was dismayed by the pause spent by
the rivals in mutual survey; he had a question which he kept for
desperate emergencies, laid up in his mind, as it were, against a rainy
day. Now was the proper time to bring it out.

"Well, monsieur,"
he said, looking at Chatelet with an important air, "is there anything
fresh? anything that people are talking about?"

"Why, the latest
thing is M. Chardon," Chatelet said maliciously. "Ask him. Have you
brought some charming poet for us?" inquired the vivacious Baron,
adjusting the side curl that had gone astray on his temple.

"I should have asked you whether I had succeeded," Lucien answered;
"you have been before me in the field of verse."

"Pshaw!"
said the other, "a few vaudevilles, well enough in their way, written
to oblige, a song now and again to suit some occasion, lines for music,
no good without the music, and my long Epistle to a Sister of Bonaparte
(ungrateful that he was), will not hand down my name to posterity."

At
this moment Mme. de Bargeton appeared in all the glory of an elaborate
toilette. She wore a Jewess' turban, enriched with an Eastern clasp.
The cameos on her neck gleamed through the gauze scarf gracefully wound
about her shoulders; the sleeves of her printed muslin dress were short
so as to display a series of bracelets on her shapely white arms.
Lucien was charmed with this theatrical style of dress. M. du Chatelet
gallantly plied the queen with fulsome compliments, that made her smile
with pleasure; she was so glad to be praised in Lucien's hearing. But
she scarcely gave her dear poet a glance, and met Chatelet with a
mortifying civility that kept him at a distance.

By this time
the guests began to arrive. First and foremost appeared the Bishop and
his Vicar-General, dignified and reverend figures both, though no two
men could well be more unlike, his lordship being tall and attenuated,
and his acolyte short and fat. Both churchmen's eyes were bright; but
while the Bishop was pallid, his Vicar-General's countenance glowed
with high health. Both were impassive, and gesticulated but little;
both appeared to be prudent men, and their silence and reserve were
supposed to hide great intellectual powers.

Close upon the two
ecclesiastics followed Mme. de Chandour and her husband, a couple so
extraordinary that those who are unfamiliar with provincial life might
be tempted to think that such persons are purely imaginary. Amelie de
Chandour posed as the rival queen of Angouleme; her husband, M. de
Chandour, known in the circle as Stanislas, was a _ci-devant_ young
man, slim still at five-and-forty, with a countenance like a sieve. His
cravat was always tied so as to present two menacing points--one spike
reached the height of his right ear, the other pointed downwards to the
red ribbon of his cross. His coat-tails were violently at strife. A
cut-away waistcoat displayed the ample, swelling curves of a
stiffly-starched shirt fastened by massive gold studs. His dress, in
fact, was exaggerated, till he looked almost like a living caricature,
which no one could behold for the first time with gravity.

Stanislas
looked himself over from top to toe with a kind of satisfaction; he
verified the number of his waistcoat buttons, and followed the curving
outlines of his tight-fitting trousers with fond glances that came to a
standstill at last on the pointed tips of his shoes. When he ceased to
contemplate himself in this way, he looked towards the nearest mirror
to see if his hair still kept in curl; then, sticking a finger in his
waistcoat pocket, he looked about him at the women with happy eyes,
flinging his head back in three-quarters profile with all the airs of a
king of the poultry-yard, airs which were prodigiously admired by the
aristocratic circle of which he was the beau. There was a strain of
eighteenth century grossness, as a rule, in his talk; a detestable kind
of conversation which procured him some success with women--he made
them laugh. M. du Chatelet was beginning to give this gentleman some
uneasiness; and, as a matter of fact, since Mme. de Bargeton had taken
him up, the lively interest taken by the women in the Byron of
Angouleme was distinctly on the increase. His coxcomb superciliousness
tickled their curiosity; he posed as the man whom nothing can arouse
from his apathy, and his jaded Sultan airs were like a challenge.

Amelie
de Chandour, short, plump, fair-complexioned, and dark-haired, was a
poor actress; her voice was loud, like everything else about her; her
head, with its load of feathers in winter and flowers in summer, was
never still for a moment. She had a fine flow of conversation, though
she could never bring a sentence to an end without a wheezing
accompaniment from an asthma, to which she would not confess.

M.
de Saintot, otherwise Astolphe, President of the Agricultural Society,
a tall, stout, high-colored personage, usually appeared in the wake of
his wife, Elisa, a lady with a countenance like a withered fern, called
Lili by her friends--a baby name singularly at variance with its
owner's character and demeanor. Mme. de Saintot was a solemn and
extremely pious woman, and a very trying partner at a game of cards.
Astolphe was supposed to be a scientific man of the first rank. He was
as ignorant as a carp, but he had compiled the articles on Sugar and
Brandy for a Dictionary of Agriculture by wholesale plunder of
newspaper articles and pillage of previous writers. It was believed all
over the department that M. Saintot was engaged upon a treatise on
modern husbandry; but though he locked himself into his study every
morning, he had not written a couple of pages in a dozen years. If
anybody called to see him, he always contrived to be discovered
rummaging among his papers, hunting for a stray note or mending a pen;
but he spent the whole time in his study on puerilities, reading the
newspaper through from end to end, cutting figures out of corks with
his penknife, and drawing patterns on his blotting-paper. He would turn
over the leaves of his Cicero to see if anything applicable to the
events of the day might catch his eye, and drag his quotation by the
heels into the conversation that evening saying, "There is a passage in
Cicero which might have been written to suit modern times," and out
came his phrase, to the astonishment of his audience. "Really," they
said among themselves, "Astolphe is a well of learning." The
interesting fact circulated all over the town, and sustained the
general belief in M. de Saintot's abilities.

After this pair
came M. de Bartas, known as Adrien among the circle. It was M. de
Bartas who boomed out his song in a bass voice, and made prodigious
claims to musical knowledge. His self-conceit had taken a stand upon
solfeggi; he began by admiring his appearance while he sang, passed
thence to talking about music, and finally to talking of nothing else.
His musical tastes had become a monomania; he grew animated only on the
one subject of music; he was miserable all evening until somebody
begged him to sing. When he had bellowed one of his airs, he revived
again; strutted about, raised himself on his heels, and received
compliments with a deprecating air; but modesty did not prevent him
from going from group to group for his meed of praise; and when there
was no more to be said about the singer, he returned to the subject of
the song, discussing its difficulties or extolling the composer.

M.
Alexandre de Brebian performed heroic exploits in sepia; he disfigured
the walls of his friends' rooms with a swarm of crude productions, and
spoiled all the albums in the department. M. Alexandre de Brebian and
M. de Bartas came together, each with his friend's wife on his arm, a
cross-cornered arrangement which gossip declared to be carried out to
the fullest extent. As for the two women, Mesdames Charlotte de Brebian
and Josephine de Bartas, or Lolotte and Fifine, as they were called,
both took an equal interest in a scarf, or the trimming of a dress, or
the reconciliation of several irreconcilable colors; both were eaten up
with a desire to look like Parisiennes, and neglected their homes,
where everything went wrong. But if they dressed like dolls in
tightly-fitting gowns of home manufacture, and exhibited outrageous
combinations of crude colors upon their persons, their husbands availed
themselves of the artist's privilege and dressed as they pleased, and
curious it was to see the provincial dowdiness of the pair. In their
threadbare clothes they looked like the supernumeraries that represent
rank and fashion at stage weddings in third-rate theatres.

One
of the queerest figures in the rooms was M. le Comte de Senonches,
known by the aristocratic name of Jacques, a mighty hunter, lean and
sunburned, a haughty gentleman, about as amiable as a wild boar, as
suspicious as a Venetian, and jealous as a Moor, who lived on terms of
the friendliest and most perfect intimacy with M. du Hautoy, otherwise
Francis, the friend of the house.

Madame de Senonches
(Zephirine) was a tall, fine-looking woman, though her complexion was
spoiled already by pimples due to liver complaint, on which grounds she
was said to be exacting. With a slender figure and delicate
proportions, she could afford to indulge in languid manners, savoring
somewhat of affectation, but revealing passion and the consciousness
that every least caprice will be gratified by love.

Francis, the
house friend, was rather distinguished-looking. He had given up his
consulship in Valence, and sacrificed his diplomatic prospects to live
near Zephirine (also known as Zizine) in Angouleme. He had taken the
household in charge, he superintended the children's education, taught
them foreign languages, and looked after the fortunes of M. and Mme. de
Senonches with the most complete devotion. Noble Angouleme,
administrative Angouleme, and _bourgeois_ Angouleme alike had looked
askance for a long while at this phenomenon of the perfect union of
three persons; but finally the mysterious conjugal trinity appeared to
them so rare and pleasing a spectacle, that if M. du Hautoy had shown
any intention of marrying, he would have been thought monstrously
immoral. Mme. de Senonches, however, had a lady companion, a
goddaughter, and her excessive attachment to this Mlle. de la Haye was
beginning to raise surmises of disquieting mysteries; it was thought,
in spite of some impossible discrepancies in dates, that Francoise de
la Haye bore a striking likeness to Francis du Hautoy.

When
"Jacques" was shooting in the neighborhood, people used to inquire
after Francis, and Jacques would discourse on his steward's little
ailments, and talk of his wife in the second place. So curious did this
blindness seem in a man of jealous temper, that his greatest friends
used to draw him out on the topic for the amusement of others who did
not know of the mystery. M. du Hautoy was a finical dandy whose minute
care of himself had degenerated into mincing affectation and
childishness. He took an interest in his cough, his appetite, his
digestion, his night's rest. Zephirine had succeeded in making a
valetudinarian of her factotum; she coddled him and doctored him; she
crammed him with delicate fare, as if he had been a fine lady's
lap-dog; she embroidered waistcoats for him, and pocket-handkerchiefs
and cravats until he became so used to wearing finery that she
transformed him into a kind of Japanese idol. Their understanding was
perfect. In season and out of season Zizine consulted Francis with a
look, and Francis seemed to take his ideas from Zizine's eyes. They
frowned and smiled together, and seemingly took counsel of each other
before making the simplest commonplace remark.

The largest
landowner in the neighborhood, a man whom every one envied, was the
Marquis de Pimentel; he and his wife, between them, had an income of
forty thousand livres, and spent their winters in Paris. This evening
they had driven into Angouleme in their caleche, and had brought their
neighbors, the Baron and Baroness de Rastignac and their party, the
Baroness' aunt and daughters, two charming young ladies, penniless
girls who had been carefully brought up, and were dressed in the simple
way that sets off natural loveliness.

These personages, beyond
question the first in the company, met with a reception of chilling
silence; the respect paid to them was full of jealousy, especially as
everybody saw that Mme. de Bargeton paid marked attention to the
guests. The two families belonged to the very small minority who hold
themselves aloof from provincial gossip, belong to no clique, live
quietly in retirement, and maintain a dignified reserve. M. de Pimentel
and M. de Rastignac, for instance, were addressed by their names in
full, and no length of acquaintance had brought their wives and
daughters into the select coterie of Angouleme; both families were too
nearly connected with the Court to compromise themselves through
provincial follies.

The Prefect and the General in command of
the garrison were the last comers, and with them came the country
gentleman who had brought the treatise on silkworms to David that very
morning. Evidently he was the mayor of some canton or other, and a fine
estate was his sufficient title to gentility; but from his appearance,
it was plain that he was quite unused to polite society. He looked
uneasy in his clothes, he was at a loss to know what to do with his
hands, he shifted about from one foot to another as he spoke, and half
rose and sat down again when anybody spoke to him. He seemed ready to
do some menial service; he was obsequious, nervous, and grave by turns,
laughing eagerly at every joke, listening with servility; and
occasionally, imagining that people were laughing at him, he assumed a
knowing air. His treatise weighed upon his mind; again and again he
tried to talk about silkworms; but the luckless wight happened first
upon M. de Bartas, who talked music in reply, and next on M. de
Saintot, who quoted Cicero to him; and not until the evening was half
over did the mayor meet with sympathetic listeners in Mme. and Mlle. du
Brossard, a widowed gentlewoman and her daughter.

Mme. and Mlle.
du Brossard were not the least interesting persons in the clique, but
their story may be told in a single phrase--they were as poor as they
were noble. In their dress there was just that tinge of pretension
which betrayed carefully hidden penury. The daughter, a big, heavy
young woman of seven-and-twenty, was supposed to be a good performer on
the piano, and her mother praised her in season and out of season in
the clumsiest way. No eligible man had any taste which Camille did not
share on her mother's authoritative statement. Mme. du Brossard, in her
anxiety to establish her child, was capable of saying that her dear
Camille liked nothing so much as a roving life from one garrison to
another; and before the evening was out, that she was sure her dear
Camille liked a quiet country farmhouse existence of all things. Mother
and daughter had the pinched sub-acid dignity characteristic of those
who have learned by experience the exact value of expressions of
sympathy; they belonged to a class which the world delights to pity;
they had been the objects of the benevolent interest of egoism; they
had sounded the empty void beneath the consoling formulas with which
the world ministers to the necessities of the unfortunate.

M. de
Severac was fifty-nine years old, and a childless widower. Mother and
daughter listened, therefore, with devout admiration to all that he
told them about his silkworm nurseries.

"My daughter has always
been fond of animals," said the mother. "And as women are especially
interested in the silk which the little creatures produce, I shall ask
permission to go over to Severac, so that my Camille may see how the
silk is spun. My Camille is so intelligent, she will grasp anything
that you tell her in a moment. Did she not understand one day the
inverse ratio of the squares of distances!"

This was the remark
that brought the conversation between Mme. du Brossard and M. de
Severac to a glorious close after Lucien's reading that night.

A
few habitues slipped in familiarly among the rest, so did one or two
eldest sons; shy, mute young men tricked out in gorgeous jewelry, and
highly honored by an invitation to this literary solemnity, the boldest
men among them so far shook off the weight of awe as to chatter a good
deal with Mlle. de la Haye. The women solemnly arranged themselves in a
circle, and the men stood behind them. It was a quaint assemblage of
wrinkled countenances and heterogeneous costumes, but none the less it
seemed very alarming to Lucien, and his heart beat fast when he felt
that every one was looking at him. His assurance bore the ordeal with
some difficulty in spite of the encouraging example of Mme. de
Bargeton, who welcomed the most illustrious personages of Angouleme
with ostentatious courtesy and elaborate graciousness; and the
uncomfortable feeling that oppressed him was aggravated by a trifling
matter which any one might have foreseen, though it was bound to come
as an unpleasant shock to a young man with so little experience of the
world. Lucien, all eyes and ears, noticed that no one except Louise, M.
de Bargeton, the Bishop, and some few who wished to please the mistress
of the house, spoke of him as M. de Rubempre; for his formidable
audience he was M. Chardon. Lucien's courage sank under their
inquisitive eyes. He could read his plebeian name in the mere movements
of their lips, and hear the anticipatory criticisms made in the blunt,
provincial fashion that too often borders on rudeness. He had not
expected this prolonged ordeal of pin-pricks; it put him still more out
of humor with himself. He grew impatient to begin the reading, for then
he could assume an attitude which should put an end to his mental
torments; but Jacques was giving Mme. de Pimentel the history of his
last day's sport; Adrien was holding forth to Mlle. Laure de Rastignac
on Rossini, the newly-risen music star, and Astolphe, who had got by
heart a newspaper paragraph on a patent plow, was giving the Baron the
benefit of the description. Lucien, luckless poet that he was, did not
know that there was scarce a soul in the room besides Mme. de Bargeton
who could understand poetry. The whole matter-of-fact assembly was
there by a misapprehension, nor did they, for the most part, know what
they had come out for to see. There are some words that draw a public
as unfailingly as the clash of cymbals, the trumpet, or the
mountebank's big drum; "beauty," "glory," "poetry," are words that
bewitch the coarsest intellect.

When every one had arrived; when
the buzz of talk ceased after repeated efforts on the part of M. de
Bargeton, who, obedient to his wife, went round the room much as the
beadle makes the circle of the church, tapping the pavement with his
wand; when silence, in fact, was at last secured, Lucien went to the
round table near Mme. de Bargeton. A fierce thrill of excitement ran
through him as he did so. He announced in an uncertain voice that, to
prevent disappointment, he was about to read the masterpieces of a
great poet, discovered only recently (for although Andre de Chenier's
poems appeared in 1819, no one in Angouleme had so much as heard of
him). Everybody interpreted this announcement in one way--it was a
shift of Mme. de Bargeton's, meant to save the poet's self-love and to
put the audience at ease.

Lucien began with _Le Malade_, and the
poem was received with a murmur of applause; but he followed it with
_L'Aveugle_, which proved too great a strain upon the average
intellect. None but artists or those endowed with the artistic
temperament can understand and sympathize with him in the diabolical
torture of that reading. If poetry is to be rendered by the voice, and
if the listener is to grasp all that it means, the most devout
attention is essential; there should be an intimate alliance between
the reader and his audience, or swift and subtle communication of the
poet's thought and feeling becomes impossible. Here this close sympathy
was lacking, and Lucien in consequence was in the position of an angel
who should endeavor to sing of heaven amid the chucklings of hell. An
intelligent man in the sphere most stimulating to his faculties can see
in every direction, like a snail; he has the keen scent of a dog, the
ears of a mole; he can hear, and feel, and see all that is going on
around him. A musician or a poet knows at once whether his audience is
listening in admiration or fails to follow him, and feels it as the
plant that revives or droops under favorable or unfavorable conditions.
The men who had come with their wives had fallen to discussing their
own affairs; by the acoustic law before mentioned, every murmur rang in
Lucien's ear; he saw all the gaps caused by the spasmodic workings of
jaws sympathetically affected, the teeth that seemed to grin defiance
at him.

When, like the dove in the deluge, he looked round for
any spot on which his eyes might rest, he saw nothing but rows of
impatient faces. Their owners clearly were waiting for him to make an
end; they had come together to discuss questions of practical interest.
With the exceptions of Laure de Rastignac, the Bishop, and two or three
of the young men, they one and all looked bored. As a matter of fact,
those who understand poetry strive to develop the germs of another
poetry, quickened within them by the poet's poetry; but this glacial
audience, so far from attaining to the spirit of the poet, did not even
listen to the letter.

Lucien felt profoundly discouraged; he was
damp with chilly perspiration; a glowing glance from Louise, to whom he
turned, gave him courage to persevere to the end, but this poet's heart
was bleeding from countless wounds.

"Do you find this very amusing, Fifine?" inquired the wizened Lili, who
perhaps had expected some kind of gymnastics.

"Don't ask me what I think, dear; I cannot keep my eyes open when any
one begins to read aloud."

"I
hope that Nais will not give us poetry often in the evenings," said
Francis. "If I am obliged to attend while somebody reads aloud after
dinner, it upsets my digestion."

"Poor dearie," whispered Zephirine, "take a glass of eau _sucree_."

"It was very well declaimed," said Alexandre, "but I like whist better
myself."

After
this dictum, which passed muster as a joke from the play on the word
"whist," several card-players were of the opinion that the reader's
voice needed a rest, and on this pretext one or two couples slipped
away into the card-room. But Louise, and the Bishop, and pretty Laure
de Rastignac besought Lucien to continue, and this time he caught the
attention of his audience with Chenier's spirited reactionary _Iambes_.
Several persons, carried away by his impassioned delivery, applauded
the reading without understanding the sense. People of this sort are
impressed by vociferation, as a coarse palate is ticked by strong
spirits.

During the interval, as they partook of ices, Zephirine
despatched Francis to examine the volume, and informed her neighbor
Amelie that the poetry was in print.

Amelie brightened visibly.

"Why,
that is easily explained," said she. "M. de Rubempre works for a
printer. It is as if a pretty woman should make her own dresses," she
added, looking at Lolotte.

"He printed his poetry himself!" said the women among themselves.

"Then,
why does he call himself M. de Rubempre?" inquired Jacques. "If a noble
takes a handicraft, he ought to lay his name aside."

"So he did as a matter of fact," said Zizine, "but his name was
plebeian, and he took his mother's name, which is noble."

"Well, if his verses are printed, we can read them for ourselves," said
Astolphe.

This
piece of stupidity complicated the question, until Sixte du Chatelet
condescended to inform these unlettered folk that the prefatory
announcement was no oratorical flourish, but a statement of fact, and
added that the poems had been written by a Royalist brother of
Marie-Joseph Chenier, the Revolutionary leader. All Angouleme, except
Mme. de Rastignac and her two daughters and the Bishop, who had really
felt the grandeur of the poetry, were mystified, and took offence at
the hoax. There was a smothered murmur, but Lucien did not heed it. The
intoxication of the poetry was upon him; he was far away from the
hateful world, striving to render in speech the music that filled his
soul, seeing the faces about him through a cloudy haze. He read the
sombre Elegy on the Suicide, lines in the taste of a by-gone day,
pervaded by sublime melancholy; then he turned to the page where the
line occurs, "Thy songs are sweet, I love to say them over," and ended
with the delicate idyll _Neere_.

Mme. de Bargeton sat with one
hand buried in her curls, heedless of the havoc she wrought among them,
gazing before her with unseeing eyes, alone in her drawing-room, lost
in delicious dreaming; for the first time in her life she had been
transported to the sphere which was hers by right of nature. Judge,
therefore, how unpleasantly she was disturbed by Amelie, who took it
upon herself to express the general wish.

"Nais," this voice
broke in, "we came to hear M. Chardon's poetry, and you are giving us
poetry out of a book. The extracts are very nice, but the ladies feel a
patriotic preference for the wine of the country; they would rather
have it."

"The French language does not lend itself very readily
to poetry, does it?" Astolphe remarked to Chatelet. "Cicero's prose is
a thousand times more poetical to my way of thinking."

"The true poetry of France is song, lyric verse," Chatelet answered.

"Which proves that our language is eminently adapted for music," said
Adrien.

"I
should like very much to hear the poetry that has cost Nais her
reputation," said Zephirine; "but after receiving Amelie's request in
such a way, it is not very likely that she will give us a specimen."

"She ought to have them recited in justice to herself," said Francis.
"The little fellow's genius is his sole justification."

"You have been in the diplomatic service," said Amelie to M. du
Chatelet, "go and manage it somehow."

"Nothing easier," said the Baron.

The
Princess' private secretary, being accustomed to petty manoeuvres of
this kind, went to the Bishop and contrived to bring him to the fore.
At the Bishop's entreaty, Nais had no choice but to ask Lucien to
recite his own verses for them, and the Baron received a languishing
smile from Amelie as the reward of his prompt success.

"Decidedly, the Baron is a very clever man," she observed to Lolotte.

But Amelie's previous acidulous remark about women who made their own
dresses rankled in Lolotte's mind.

"Since when have you begun to recognize the Emperor's barons?" she
asked, smiling.

Lucien
had essayed to deify his beloved in an ode, dedicated to her under a
title in favor with all lads who write verse after leaving school. This
ode, so fondly cherished, so beautiful--since it was the outpouring of
all the love in his heart, seemed to him to be the one piece of his own
work that could hold its own with Chenier's verse; and with a tolerably
fatuous glance at Mme. de Bargeton, he announced "TO HER!" He struck an
attitude proudly for the delivery of the ambitious piece, for his
author's self-love felt safe and at ease behind Mme. de Bargeton's
petticoat. And at the selfsame moment Mme. de Bargeton betrayed her own
secret to the women's curious eyes. Although she had always looked down
upon this audience from her own loftier intellectual heights, she could
not help trembling for Lucien. Her face was troubled, there was a sort
of mute appeal for indulgence in her glances, and while the verses were
recited she was obliged to lower her eyes and dissemble her pleasure as
stanza followed stanza.

TO HER.

Out
of the glowing heart of the torrent of glory and light, At the foot of
Jehovah's throne where the angels stand afar, Each on a seistron of
gold repeating the prayers of the night, Put up for each by his star.

Out
from the cherubim choir a bright-haired Angel springs, Veiling the
glory of God that dwells on a dazzling brow, Leaving the courts of
heaven to sink upon silver wings Down to our world below.

God
looked in pity on earth, and the Angel, reading His thought, Came down
to lull the pain of the mighty spirit at strife, Reverent bent o'er the
maid, and for age left desolate brought Flowers of the springtime of
life.

Bringing a dream of hope to solace the mother's fears,
Hearkening unto the voice of the tardy repentant cry, Glad as angels
are glad, to reckon Earth's pitying tears, Given with alms of a sigh.

One
there is, and but one, bright messenger sent from the skies Whom earth
like a lover fain would hold from the hea'nward flight; But the angel,
weeping, turns and gazes with sad, sweet eyes Up to the heaven of light.

Not
by the radiant eyes, not by the kindling glow Of virtue sent from God,
did I know the secret sign, Nor read the token sent on a white and
dazzling brow Of an origin divine.

Nay, it was Love grown blind
and dazed with excess of light, Striving and striving in vain to mingle
Earth and Heaven, Helpless and powerless against the invincible armor
bright By the dread archangel given.

Ah! be wary, take heed,
lest aught should be seen or heard Of the shining seraph band, as they
take the heavenward way; Too soon the Angel on Earth will learn the
magical word Sung at the close of the day.

Then you shall see
afar, rifting the darkness of night, A gleam as of dawn that spread
across the starry floor, And the seaman that watch for a sign shall
mark the track of their flight, A luminous pathway in Heaven and a
beacon for evermore.

"It
is the sort of stuff that we all of us wrote more or less after we left
school," said the Baron with a bored expression--he was acting his part
of arbiter of taste who has seen everything. "We used to deal in
Ossianic mists, Malvinas and Fingals and cloudy shapes, and warriors
who got out of their tombs with stars above their heads. Nowadays this
poetical frippery has been replaced by Jehovah, angels, seistrons, the
plumes of seraphim, and all the paraphernalia of paradise freshened up
with a few new words such as 'immense, infinite, solitude,
intelligence'; you have lakes, and the words of the Almighty, a kind of
Christianized Pantheism, enriched with the most extraordinary and
unheard-of rhymes. We are in quite another latitude, in fact; we have
left the North for the East, but the darkness is just as thick as
before."

"If the ode is obscure, the declaration is very clear, it seems to me,"
said Zephirine.

"And the archangel's armor is a tolerably thin gauze robe," said
Francis.

Politeness
demanded that the audience should profess to be enchanted with the
poem; and the women, furious because they had no poets in their train
to extol them as angels, rose, looked bored by the reading, murmuring,
"Very nice!" "Charming!" "Perfect!" with frigid coldness.

"If
you love me, do not congratulate the poet or his angel," Lolotte laid
her commands on her dear Adrien in imperious tones, and Adrien was fain
to obey.

"Empty words, after all," Zephirine remarked to Francis, "and love is a
poem that we live."

"You
have just expressed the very thing that I was thinking, Zizine, but I
should not have put it so neatly," said Stanislas, scanning himself
from top to toe with loving attention.

"I would give, I don't
know how much, to see Nais' pride brought down a bit," said Amelie,
addressing Chatelet. "Nais sets up to be an archangel, as if she were
better than the rest of us, and mixes us up with low people; his father
was an apothecary, and his mother is a nurse; his sister works in a
laundry, and he himself is a printer's foreman."

"If his father sold biscuits for worms" (_vers_), said Jacques, "he
ought to have made his son take them."

"He
is continuing in his father's line of business, for the stuff that he
has just been reading to us is a drug in the market, it seems," said
Stanislas, striking one of his most killing attitudes. "Drug for drug,
I would rather have something else."

Every one apparently
combined to humiliate Lucien by various aristocrats' sarcasms. Lili the
religious thought it a charitable deed to use any means of enlightening
Nais, and Nais was on the brink of a piece of folly. Francis the
diplomatist undertook the direction of the silly conspiracy; every one
was interested in the progress of the drama; it would be something to
talk about to-morrow. The ex-consul, being far from anxious to engage
in a duel with a young poet who would fly into a rage at the first hint
of insult under his lady's eyes, was wise enough to see that the only
way of dealing Lucien his deathblow was by the spiritual arm which was
safe from vengeance. He therefore followed the example set by Chatelet
the astute, and went to the Bishop. Him he proceeded to mystify.

He
told the Bishop that Lucien's mother was a woman of uncommon powers and
great modesty, and that it was she who found the subjects for her son's
verses. Nothing pleased Lucien so much, according to the guileful
Francis, as any recognition of her talents--he worshiped his mother.
Then, having inculcated these notions, he left the rest to time. His
lordship was sure to bring out the insulting allusion, for which he had
been so carefully prepared, in the course of conversation.

When
Francis and the Bishop joined the little group where Lucien stood, the
circle who gave him the cup of hemlock to drain by little sips watched
him with redoubled interest. The poet, luckless young man, being a
total stranger, and unaware of the manners and customs of the house,
could only look at Mme. de Bargeton and give embarrassed answers to
embarrassing questions. He knew neither the names nor condition of the
people about him; the women's silly speeches made him blush for them,
and he was at his wits' end for a reply. He felt, moreover, how very
far removed he was from these divinities of Angouleme when he heard
himself addressed sometimes as M. Chardon, sometimes as M. de Rubempre,
while they addressed each other as Lolotte, Adrien, Astolphe, Lili and
Fifine. His confusion rose to a height when, taking Lili for a man's
surname, he addressed the coarse M. de Senonches as M. Lili; that
Nimrod broke in upon him with a "_MONSIEUR LULU?_" and Mme. de Bargeton
flushed red to the eyes.

"A woman must be blind indeed to bring this little fellow among us!"
muttered Senonches.

Zephirine
turned to speak to the Marquise de Pimentel--"Do you not see a strong
likeness between M. Chardon and M. de Cante-Croix, madame?" she asked
in a low but quite audible voice.

"The likeness is ideal," smiled Mme. de Pimentel.

"Glory
has a power of attraction to which we can confess," said Mme. de
Bargeton, addressing the Marquise. "Some women are as much attracted by
greatness as others by littleness," she added, looking at Francis.

The
was beyond Zephirine's comprehension; she thought her consul a very
great man; but the Marquise laughed, and her laughter ranged her on
Nais' side.

"You are very fortunate, monsieur," said the Marquis
de Pimentel, addressing Lucien for the purpose of calling him M. de
Rubempre, and not M. Chardon, as before; "you should never find time
heavy on your hands."

"Do you work quickly?" asked Lolotte, much in the way that she would
have asked a joiner "if it took long to make a box."

The bludgeon stroke stunned Lucien, but he raised his head at Mme. de
Bargeton's reply--

"My dear, poetry does not grow in M. de Rubempre's head like grass in
our courtyards."

"Madame,
we cannot feel too reverently towards the noble spirits in whom God has
set some ray of this light," said the Bishop, addressing Lolotte. "Yes,
poetry is something holy. Poetry implies suffering. How many silent
nights those verses that you admire have cost! We should bow in love
and reverence before the poet; his life here is almost always a life of
sorrow; but God doubtless reserves a place in heaven for him among His
prophets. This young man is a poet," he added laying a hand on Lucien's
head; "do you not see the sign of Fate set on that high forehead of
his?"

Glad to be so generously championed, Lucien made his
acknowledgments in a grateful look, not knowing that the worthy prelate
was to deal his deathblow.

Mme. de Bargeton's eyes traveled
round the hostile circle. Her glances went like arrows to the depths of
her rivals' hearts, and left them twice as furious as before.

"Ah,
monseigneur," cried Lucien, hoping to break thick heads with his golden
sceptre, "but ordinary people have neither your intellect nor your
charity. No one heeds our sorrows, our toil is unrecognized. The
gold-digger working in the mine does not labor as we to wrest metaphors
from the heart of the most ungrateful of all languages. If this is
poetry--to give ideas such definite and clear expressions that all the
world can see and understand--the poet must continually range through
the entire scale of human intellects, so that he can satisfy the
demands of all; he must conceal hard thinking and emotion, two
antagonistic powers, beneath the most vivid color; he must know how to
make one word cover a whole world of thought; he must give the results
of whole systems of philosophy in a few picturesque lines; indeed, his
songs are like seeds that must break into blossom in other hearts
wherever they find the soil prepared by personal experience. How can
you express unless you first have felt? And is not passion suffering.
Poetry is only brought forth after painful wanderings in the vast
regions of thought and life. There are men and women in books, who seem
more really alive to us than men and women who have lived and
died--Richardson's Clarissa, Chenier's Camille, the Delia of Tibullus,
Ariosto's Angelica, Dante's Francesca, Moliere's Alceste, Beaumarchais'
Figaro, Scott's Rebecca the Jewess, the Don Quixote of Cervantes,--do
we not owe these deathless creations to immortal throes?"

"And what are you going to create for us?" asked Chatelet.

"If
I were to announce such conceptions, I should give myself out for a man
of genius, should I not?" answered Lucien. "And besides, such sublime
creations demand a long experience of the world and a study of human
passion and interests which I could not possibly have made; but I have
made a beginning," he added, with bitterness in his tone, as he took a
vengeful glance round the circle; "the time of gestation is long----"

"Then it will be a case of difficult labor," interrupted M. du Hautoy.

"Your excellent mother might assist you," suggested the Bishop.

The
epigram, innocently made by the good prelate, the long-looked-for
revenge, kindled a gleam of delight in all eyes. The smile of satisfied
caste that traveled from mouth to mouth was aggravated by M. de
Bargeton's imbecility; he burst into a laugh, as usual, some moments
later.

"Monseigneur, you are talking a little above our heads;
these ladies do not understand your meaning," said Mme. de Bargeton,
and the words paralyzed the laughter, and drew astonished eyes upon
her. "A poet who looks to the Bible for his inspiration has a mother
indeed in the Church.--M. de Rubempre, will you recite _Saint John in
Patmos_ for us, or _Belshazzar's Feast_, so that his lordship may see
that Rome is still the _Magna Parens_ of Virgil?"

The women exchanged smiles at the Latin words.

The
bravest and highest spirits know times of prostration at the outset of
life. Lucien had sunk to the depths at the blow, but he struck the
bottom with his feet, and rose to the surface again, vowing to
subjugate this little world. He rose like a bull, stung to fury by a
shower of darts, and prepared to obey Louise by declaiming _Saint John
in Patmos_; but by this time the card-tables had claimed their
complement of players, who returned to the accustomed groove to find
amusement there which poetry had not afforded them. They felt besides
that the revenge of so many outraged vanities would be incomplete
unless it were followed up by contemptuous indifference; so they showed
their tacit disdain for the native product by leaving Lucien and Mme.
de Bargeton to themselves. Every one appeared to be absorbed in his own
affairs; one chattered with the prefect about a new crossroad, another
proposed to vary the pleasures of the evening with a little music. The
great world of Angouleme, feeling that it was no judge of poetry, was
very anxious, in the first place, to hear the verdict of the Pimentels
and the Rastignacs, and formed a little group about them. The great
influence wielded in the department by these two families was always
felt on every important occasion; every one was jealous of them, every
one paid court to them, foreseeing that they might some day need that
influence.

"What do you think of our poet and his poetry?"
Jacques asked of the Marquise. Jacques used to shoot over the lands
belonging to the Pimentel family.

"Why, it is not bad for provincial poetry," she said, smiling; "and
besides, such a beautiful poet cannot do anything amiss."

Every
one thought the decision admirable; it traveled from lip to lip,
gaining malignance by the way. Then Chatelet was called upon to
accompany M. du Bartas on the piano while he mangled the great solo
from _Figaro_; and the way being opened to music, the audience, as in
duty bound listened while Chatelet in turn sang one of Chateaubriand's
ballads, a chivalrous ditty made in the time of the Empire. Duets
followed, of the kind usually left to boarding-school misses, and
rescued from the schoolroom by Mme. du Brossard, who meant to make a
brilliant display of her dear Camille's talents for M. de Severac's
benefit.

Mme. du Bargeton, hurt by the contempt which every one
showed her poet, paid back scorn for scorn by going to her boudoir
during these performances. She was followed by the prelate. His
Vicar-General had just been explaining the profound irony of the
epigram into which he had been entrapped, and the Bishop wished to make
amends. Mlle. de Rastignac, fascinated by the poetry, also slipped into
the boudoir without her mother's knowledge.

Louise drew Lucien
to her mattress-cushioned sofa; and with no one to see or hear, she
murmured in his ear, "Dear angel, they did not understand you; but,
'Thy songs are sweet, I love to say them over.'"

And Lucien took comfort from the pretty speech, and forgot his woes for
a little.

"Glory
is not to be had cheaply," Mme. de Bargeton continued, taking his hand
and holding it tightly in her own. "Endure your woes, my friend, you
will be great one day; your pain is the price of your immortality. If
only I had a hard struggle before me! God preserve you from the
enervating life without battles, in which the eagle's wings have no
room to spread themselves. I envy you; for if you suffer, at least you
live. You will put out your strength, you will feel the hope of
victory; your strife will be glorious. And when you shall come to your
kingdom, and reach the imperial sphere where great minds are enthroned,
then remember the poor creatures disinherited by fate, whose intellects
pine in an oppressive moral atmosphere, who die and have never lived,
knowing all the while what life might be; think of the piercing eyes
that have seen nothing, the delicate senses that have only known the
scent of poison flowers. Then tell in your song of plants that wither
in the depths of the forest, choked by twining growths and rank, greedy
vegetation, plants that have never been kissed by the sunlight, and
die, never having put forth a blossom. It would be a terribly gloomy
poem, would it not, a fanciful subject? What a sublime poem might be
made of the story of some daughter of the desert transported to some
cold, western clime, calling for her beloved sun, dying of a grief that
none can understand, overcome with cold and longing. It would be an
allegory; many lives are like that."

"You would picture the
spirit which remembers Heaven," said the Bishop; "some one surely must
have written such a poem in the days of old; I like to think that I see
a fragment of it in the Song of Songs."

"Take that as your subject," said Laure de Rastignac, expressing her
artless belief in Lucien's powers.

"The
great sacred poem of France is still unwritten," remarked the Bishop.
"Believe me, glory and success await the man of talent who shall work
for religion."

"That task will be his," said Mme. de Bargeton
rhetorically. "Do you not see the first beginnings of the vision of the
poem, like the flame of dawn, in his eyes?"

"Nais is treating us very badly," said Fifine; "what can she be doing?"

"Don't you hear?" said Stanislas. "She is flourishing away, using big
words that you cannot make head or tail of."

Amelie, Fifine, Adrien, and Francis appeared in the doorway with Mme.
de Rastignac, who came to look for her daughter.

"Nais,"
cried the two ladies, both delighted to break in upon the quiet chat in
the boudoir, "it would be very nice of you to come and play something
for us."

"My dear child, M. de Rubempre is just about to recite his _Saint John
in Patmos_, a magnificent biblical poem."

"Biblical!" echoed Fifine in amazement.

Amelie
and Fifine went back to the drawing-room, taking the word back with
them as food for laughter. Lucien pleaded a defective memory and
excused himself. When he reappeared, nobody took the slightest notice
of him; every one was chatting or busy at the card-tables; the poet's
aureole had been plucked away, the landowners had no use for him, the
more pretentious sort looked upon him as an enemy to their ignorance,
while the women were jealous of Mme. de Bargeton, the Beatrice of this
modern Dante, to use the Vicar-General's phrase, and looked at him with
cold, scornful eyes.

"So this is society!" Lucien said to
himself as he went down to L'Houmeau by the steps of Beaulieu; for
there are times when we choose to take the longest way, that the
physical exercise of walking may promote the flow of ideas.

So
far from being disheartened, the fury of repulsed ambition gave Lucien
new strength. Like all those whose instincts bring them to a higher
social sphere which they reach before they can hold their own in it,
Lucien vowed to make any sacrifice to the end that he might remain on
that higher social level. One by one he drew out the poisoned shafts on
his way home, talking aloud to himself, scoffing at the fools with whom
he had to do, inventing neat answers to their idiotic questions,
desperately vexed that the witty responses occurred to him so late in
the day. By the time that he reached the Bordeaux road, between the
river and the foot of the hill, he thought that he could see Eve and
David sitting on a baulk of timber by the river in the moonlight, and
went down the footpath towards them.

While Lucien was
hastening to the torture in Mme. de Bargeton's rooms, his sister had
changed her dress for a gown of pink cambric covered with narrow
stripes, a straw hat, and a little silk shawl. The simple costume
seemed like a rich toilette on Eve, for she was one of those women
whose great nature lends stateliness to the least personal detail; and
David felt prodigiously shy of her now that she had changed her working
dress. He had made up his mind that he would speak of himself; but now
as he gave his arm to this beautiful girl, and they walked through
L'Houmeau together, he could find nothing to say to her. Love delights
in such reverent awe as redeemed souls know on beholding the glory of
God. So, in silence, the two lovers went across the Bridge of Saint
Anne, and followed the left bank of the Charente. Eve felt embarrassed
by the pause, and stopped to look along the river; a joyous shaft of
sunset had turned the water between the bridge and the new powder mills
into a sheet of gold.

"What a beautiful evening it is!" she
said, for the sake of saying something; "the air is warm and fresh, and
full of the scent of flowers, and there is a wonderful sky."

"Everything
speaks to our heart," said David, trying to proceed to love by way of
analogy. "Those who love find infinite delight in discovering the
poetry of their own inmost souls in every chance effect of the
landscape, in the thin, clear air, in the scent of the earth. Nature
speaks for them."

"And loosens their tongues, too," Eve said
merrily. "You were very silent as we came through L'Houmeau. Do you
know, I felt quite uncomfortable----"

"You looked so beautiful, that I could not say anything," David
answered candidly.

"Then, just now I am not so beautiful?" inquired she.

"It
is not that," he said; "but I was so happy to have this walk alone with
you, that----" he stopped short in confusion, and looked at the
hillside and the road to Saintes.

"If the walk is any pleasure
to you, I am delighted; for I owe you an evening, I think, when you
have given up yours for me. When you refused to go to Mme. de
Bargeton's, you were quite as generous as Lucien when he made the
demand at the risk of vexing her."

"No, not generous, only
wise," said David. "And now that we are quite alone under the sky, with
no listeners except the bushes and the reeds by the edge of the
Charente, let me tell you about my anxiety as to Lucien's present step,
dear Eve. After all that I have just said, I hope that you will look on
my fears as a refinement of friendship. You and your mother have done
all that you could to put him above his social position; but when you
stimulated his ambition, did you not unthinkingly condemn him to a hard
struggle? How can he maintain himself in the society to which his
tastes incline him? I know Lucien; he likes to reap, he does not like
toil; it is his nature. Social claims will take up the whole of his
time, and for a man who has nothing but his brains, time is capital. He
likes to shine; society will stimulate his desires until no money will
satisfy them; instead of earning money, he will spend it. You have
accustomed him to believe in his great powers, in fact, but the world
at large declines to believe in any man's superior intellect until he
has achieved some signal success. Now success in literature is only won
in solitude and by dogged work. What will Mme. de Bargeton give your
brother in return for so many days spent at her feet? Lucien has too
much spirit to accept help from her; and he cannot afford, as we know,
to cultivate her society, twice ruinous as it is for him. Sooner or
later that woman will throw over this dear brother of ours, but not
before she has spoiled him for hard work, and given him a taste for
luxury and a contempt for our humdrum life. She will develop his love
of enjoyment, his inclination for idleness, that debauches a poetic
soul. Yes, it makes me tremble to think that this great lady may make a
plaything of Lucien. If she cares for him sincerely, he will forget
everything else for her; or if she does not love him, she will make him
unhappy, for he is wild about her."

"You have sent a chill of
dread through my heart," said Eve, stopping as they reached the weir.
"But so long as mother is strong enough for her tiring life, so long as
I live, we shall earn enough, perhaps, between us to keep Lucien until
success comes. My courage will never fail," said Eve, brightening.
"There is no hardship in work when we work for one we love; it is not
drudgery. It makes me happy to think that I toil so much, if indeed it
is toil, for him. Oh, do not be in the least afraid, we will earn money
enough to send Lucien into the great world. There lies his road to
success."

"And there lies his road to ruin," returned David.
"Dear Eve, listen to me. A man needs an independent fortune, or the
sublime cynicism of poverty, for the slow execution of great work.
Believe me, Lucien's horror of privation is so great, the savor of
banquets, the incense of success is so sweet in his nostrils, his
self-love has grown so much in Mme. de Bargeton's boudoir, that he will
do anything desperate sooner than fall back, and you will never earn
enough for his requirements.

"Then you are only a false friend to him!" Eve cried in despair, "or
you would not discourage us in this way."

"Eve!
Eve!" cried David, "if only I could be a brother to Lucien! You alone
can give me that title; he could accept anything from me then; I should
claim the right of devoting my life to him with the love that hallows
your self-sacrifice, but with some worldly wisdom too. Eve, my darling,
give Lucien a store from which he need not blush to draw! His brother's
purse will be like his own, will it not? If you only knew all my
thoughts about Lucien's position! If he means to go to Mme. de
Bargeton's, he must not be my foreman any longer, poor fellow! He ought
not to live in L'Houmeau; you ought not to be a working girl; and your
mother must give up her employment as well. If you would consent to be
my wife, the difficulties will all be smoothed away. Lucien might live
on the second floor in the Place du Murier until I can build rooms for
him over the shed at the back of the yard (if my father will allow it,
that is.). And in that way we would arrange a free and independent life
for him. The wish to support Lucien will give me a better will to work
than I ever should have had for myself alone; but it rests with you to
give me the right to devote myself to him. Some day, perhaps, he will
go to Paris, the only place that can bring out all that is in him, and
where his talents will be appreciated and rewarded. Living in Paris is
expensive, and the earnings of all three of us will be needed for his
support. And besides, will not you and your mother need some one to
lean upon then? Dear Eve, marry me for love of Lucien; perhaps
afterwards you will love me when you see how I shall strive to help him
and to make you happy. We are, both of us, equally simple in our
tastes; we have few wants; Lucien's welfare shall be the great object
of our lives. His heart shall be our treasure-house, we will lay up all
our fortune, and think and feel and hope in him."

"Worldly
considerations keep us apart," said Eve, moved by this love that tried
to explain away its greatness. "You are rich and I am poor. One must
love indeed to overcome such a difficulty."

"Then you do not care enough for me?" cried the stricken David.

"But perhaps your father would object----"

"Never
mind," said David; "if asking my father is all that is necessary, you
will be my wife. Eve, my dear Eve, how you have lightened life for me
in a moment; and my heart has been very heavy with thoughts that I
could not utter, I did not know how to speak of them. Only tell me that
you care for me a little, and I will take courage to tell you the rest."

"Indeed,"
she said, "you make me quite ashamed; but confidence for confidence, I
will tell you this, that I have never thought of any one but you in my
life. I looked upon you as one of those men to whom a woman might be
proud to belong, and I did not dare to hope so great a thing for
myself, a penniless working girl with no prospects."

"That is
enough, that is enough," he answered, sitting down on the bar by the
weir, for they had gone to and fro like mad creatures over the same
length of pathway.

"What is the matter?" she asked, her voice expressing for the first
time a woman's sweet anxiety for one who belongs to her.

"Nothing
but good," he answered. "It is the sight of a whole lifetime of
happiness that dazzles me, as it were; it is overwhelming. Why am I
happier than you?" he asked, with a touch of sadness. "For I know that
I am happier."

Eve looked at David with mischievous, doubtful eyes that asked an
explanation.

"Dear
Eve, I am taking more than I give. So I shall always love you more than
you love me, because I have more reason to love. You are an angel; I am
a man."

"I am not so learned," Eve said, smiling. "I love you----"

"As much as you love Lucien?" he broke in.

"Enough
to be your wife, enough to devote myself to you, to try not to add
anything to your burdens, for we shall have some struggles; it will not
be quite easy at first."

"Dear Eve, have you known that I loved you since the first day I saw
you?"

"Where is the woman who does not feel that she is loved?"

"Now
let me get rid of your scruples as to my imaginary riches. I am a poor
man, dear. Yes, it pleased my father to ruin me; he made a speculation
of me, as a good many so-called benefactors do. If I make a fortune, it
will be entirely through you. That is not a lover's speech, but sober,
serious earnest. I ought to tell you about my faults, for they are
exceedingly bad ones in a man who has his way to make. My character and
habits and favorite occupations all unfit me for business and
money-getting, and yet we can only make money by some kind of industry;
if I have some faculty for the discovery of gold-mines, I am singularly
ill-adapted for getting the gold out of them. But you who, for your
brother's sake, went into the smallest details, with a talent for
thrift, and the patient watchfulness of the born man of business, you
will reap the harvest that I shall sow. The present state of things,
for I have been like one of the family for a long time, weighs so
heavily upon me, that I have spent days and nights in search of some
way of making a fortune. I know something of chemistry, and a knowledge
of commercial requirements has put me on the scent of a discovery that
is likely to pay. I can say nothing as yet about it; there will be a
long while to wait; perhaps for some years we may have a hard time of
it; but I shall find out how to make a commercial article at last.
Others are busy making the same researches, and if I am first in the
field, we shall have a large fortune. I have said nothing to Lucien,
his enthusiastic nature would spoil everything; he would convert my
hopes into realities, and begin to live like a lord, and perhaps get
into debt. So keep my secret for me. Your sweet and dear companionship
will be consolation in itself during the long time of experiment, and
the desire to gain wealth for you and Lucien will give me persistence
and tenacity----"

"I had guessed this too," Eve said,
interrupting him; "I knew that you were one of those inventors, like my
poor father, who must have a woman to take care of them."

"Then
you love me! Ah! say so without fear to me, who saw a symbol of my love
for you in your name. Eve was the one woman in the world; if it was
true in the outward world for Adam, it is true again in the inner world
of my heart for me. My God! do you love me?"

"Yes," said she, lengthening out the word as if to make it cover the
extent of feeling expressed by a single syllable.

"Well,
let us sit here," he said, and taking Eve's hand, he went to a great
baulk of timber lying below the wheels of a paper-mill. "Let me breathe
the evening air, and hear the frogs croak, and watch the moonlight
quivering upon the river; let me take all this world about us into my
soul, for it seems to me that my happiness is written large over it
all; I am seeing it for the first time in all its splendor, lighted up
by love, grown fair through you. Eve, dearest, this is the first moment
of pure and unmixed joy that fate has given to me! I do not think that
Lucien can be as happy as I am."

David felt Eve's hand, damp and quivering in his own, and a tear fell
upon it.

"May I not know the secret?" she pleaded coaxingly.

"You
have a right to know it, for your father was interested in the matter,
and to-day it is a pressing question, and for this reason. Since the
downfall of the Empire, calico has come more and more into use, because
it is so much cheaper than linen. At the present moment, paper is made
of a mixture of hemp and linen rags, but the raw material is dear, and
the expense naturally retards the great advance which the French press
is bound to make. Now you cannot increase the output of linen rags, a
given population gives a pretty constant result, and it only increases
with the birth-rate. To make any perceptible difference in the
population for this purpose, it would take a quarter of a century and a
great revolution in habits of life, trade, and agriculture. And if the
supply of linen rags is not enough to meet one-half nor one-third of
the demand, some cheaper material than linen rags must be found for
cheap paper. This deduction is based on facts that came under my
knowledge here. The Angouleme paper-makers, the last to use pure linen
rags, say that the proportion of cotton in the pulp has increased to a
frightful extent of late years."

In answer to a question from
Eve, who did not know what "pulp" meant, David gave an account of
paper-making, which will not be out of place in a volume which owes its
existence in book form to the paper industry no less than to the
printing-press; but the long digression, doubtless, had best be
condensed at first.

Paper, an invention not less marvelous than
the other dependent invention of printing, was known in ancient times
in China. Thence by the unrecognized channels of commerce the art
reached Asia Minor, where paper was made of cotton reduced to pulp and
boiled. Parchment had become so extremely dear that a cheap substitute
was discovered in an imitation of the cotton paper known in the East as
_charta bombycina_. The imitation, made from rags, was first made at
Basel, in 1170, by a colony of Greek refugees, according to some
authorities; or at Padua, in 1301, by an Italian named Pax, according
to others. In these ways the manufacture of paper was perfected slowly
and in obscurity; but this much is certain, that so early as the reign
of Charles VI., paper pulp for playing-cards was made in Paris.

When
those immortals, Faust, Coster, and Gutenberg, invented the Book,
craftsmen as obscure as many a great artist of those times appropriated
paper to the uses of typography. In the fifteenth century, that naive
and vigorous age, names were given to the various formats as well as to
the different sizes of type, names that bear the impress of the naivete
of the times; and the various sheets came to be known by the different
watermarks on their centres; the grapes, the figure of our Saviour, the
crown, the shield, or the flower-pot, just as at a later day, the eagle
of Napoleon's time gave the name to the "double-eagle" size. And in the
same way the types were called Cicero, Saint-Augustine, and Canon type,
because they were first used to print the treatises of Cicero and
theological and liturgical works. Italics are so called because they
were invented in Italy by Aldus of Venice.

Before the invention
of machine-made paper, which can be woven in any length, the largest
sized sheets were the _grand jesus_ and the double columbier (this last
being scarcely used now except for atlases or engravings), and the size
of paper for printers' use was determined by the dimensions of the
impression-stone. When David explained these things to Eve, web-paper
was almost undreamed of in France, although, about 1799, Denis Robert
d'Essonne had invented a machine for turning out a ribbon of paper, and
Didot-Saint-Leger had since tried to perfect it. The vellum paper
invented by Ambroise Didot only dates back as far as 1780.

This
bird's eye view of the history of the invention shows incontestably
that great industrial and intellectual advances are made exceedingly
slowly, and little by little, even as Nature herself proceeds. Perhaps
articulate speech and the art of writing were gradually developed in
the same groping way as typography and paper-making.

"Rag-pickers
collect all the rags and old linen of Europe," the printer concluded,
"and buy any kind of tissue. The rags are sorted and warehoused by the
wholesale rag merchants, who supply the paper-mills. To give you some
idea of the extent of the trade, you must know, mademoiselle, that in
1814 Cardon the banker, owner of the pulping troughs of Bruges and
Langlee (where Leorier de l'Isle endeavored in 1776 to solve the very
problem that occupied your father), Cardon brought an action against
one Proust for an error in weights of two millions in a total of ten
million pounds' weight of rags, worth about four million francs! The
manufacturer washes the rags and reduces them to a thin pulp, which is
strained, exactly as a cook strains sauce through a tamis, through an
iron frame with a fine wire bottom where the mark which give its name
to the size of the paper is woven. The size of this _mould_, as it is
called, regulates the size of the sheet.

"When I was with the
Messieurs Didot," David continued, "they were very much interested in
this question, and they are still interested; for the improvement which
your father endeavored to make is a great commercial requirement, and
one of the crying needs of the time. And for this reason: although
linen lasts so much longer than cotton, that it is in reality cheaper
in the end, the poor would rather make the smaller outlay in the first
instance, and, by virtue of the law of _Vae victis!_ pay enormously
more before they have done. The middle classes do the same. So there is
a scarcity of linen. In England, where four-fifths of the population
use cotton to the exclusion of linen, they make nothing but cotton
paper. The cotton paper is very soft and easily creased to begin with,
and it has a further defect: it is so soluble that if you seep a book
made of cotton paper in water for fifteen minutes, it turns to a pulp,
while an old book left in water for a couple of hours is not spoilt.
You could dry the old book, and the pages, though yellow and faded,
would still be legible, the work would not be destroyed.

"There
is a time coming when legislation will equalize our fortunes, and we
shall all be poor together; we shall want our linen and our books to be
cheap, just as people are beginning to prefer small pictures because
they have not wall space enough for large ones. Well, the shirts and
the books will not last, that is all; it is the same on all sides,
solidity is drying out. So this problem is one of the first importance
for literature, science, and politics.

"One day, in my office,
there was a hot discussion going on about the material that the Chinese
use for making paper. Their paper is far better than ours, because the
raw material is better; and a good deal was said about this thin, light
Chinese paper, for if it is light and thin, the texture is close, there
are no transparent spots in it. In Paris there are learned men among
the printers' readers; Fourier and Pierre Leroux are Lachevardiere's
readers at this moment; and the Comte de Saint-Simon, who happened to
be correcting proofs for us, came in in the middle of the discussion.
He told us at once that, according to Kempfer and du Halde, the
_Broussonetia_ furnishes the substance of the Chinese paper; it is a
vegetable substance (like linen or cotton for that matter). Another
reader maintained that Chinese paper was principally made of an animal
substance, to wit, the silk that is abundant there. They made a bet
about it in my presence. The Messieurs Didot are printers to the
Institute, so naturally they referred the question to that learned
body. M. Marcel, who used to be superintendent of the Royal Printing
Establishment, was umpire, and he sent the two readers to M. l'Abbe
Grozier, Librarian at the Arsenal. By the Abbe's decision they both
lost their wages. The paper was not made of silk nor yet from the
_Broussonetia_; the pulp proved to be the triturated fibre of some kind
of bamboo. The Abbe Grozier had a Chinese book, an iconographical and
technological work, with a great many pictures in it, illustrating all
the different processes of paper-making, and he showed us a picture of
the workshop with the bamboo stalks lying in a heap in the corner; it
was extremely well drawn.

"Lucien told me that your father, with
the intuition of a man of talent, had a glimmering of a notion of some
way of replacing linen rags with an exceedingly common vegetable
product, not previously manufactured, but taken direct from the soil,
as the Chinese use vegetable fibre at first hand. I have classified the
guesses made by those who came before me, and have begun to study the
question. The bamboo is a kind of reed; naturally I began to think of
the reeds that grow here in France.

"Labor is very cheap in
China, where a workman earns three halfpence a day, and this cheapness
of labor enables the Chinese to manipulate each sheet of paper
separately. They take it out of the mould, and press it between heated
tablets of white porcelain, that is the secret of the surface and
consistence, the lightness and satin smoothness of the best paper in
the world. Well, here in Europe the work must be done by machinery;
machinery must take the place of cheap Chinese labor. If we could but
succeed in making a cheap paper of as good a quality, the weight and
thickness of printed books would be reduced by more than one-half. A
set of Voltaire, printed on our woven paper and bound, weighs about two
hundred and fifty pounds; it would only weigh fifty if we used Chinese
paper. That surely would be a triumph, for the housing of many books
has come to be a difficulty; everything has grown smaller of late; this
is not an age of giants; men have shrunk, everything about them
shrinks, and house-room into the bargain. Great mansions and great
suites of rooms will be abolished sooner or later in Paris, for no one
will afford to live in the great houses built by our forefathers. What
a disgrace for our age if none of its books should last! Dutch
paper--that is, paper made from flax--will be quite unobtainable in ten
years' time. Well, your brother told me of this idea of your father's,
this plan for using vegetable fibre in paper-making, so you see that if
I succeed, you have a right to----"

Lucien came up at that moment and interrupted David's generous
assertion.

"I do not know whether you have found the evening pleasant," said he;
"it has been a cruel time for me."

"Poor Lucien! what can have happened?" cried Eve, as she saw her
brother's excited face.

The
poet told the history of his agony, pouring out a flood of clamorous
thoughts into those friendly hearts, Eve and David listening in pained
silence to a torrent of woes that exhibited such greatness and such
pettiness.

"M. de Bargeton is an old dotard. The indigestion
will carry him off before long, no doubt," Lucien said, as he made an
end, "and then I will look down on these proud people; I will marry
Mme. de Bargeton. I read to-night in her eyes a love as great as mine
for her. Yes, she felt all that I felt; she comforted me; she is as
great and noble as she is gracious and beautiful. She will never give
me up."

"It is time that life was made smooth for him, is it
not?" murmured David, and for answer Eve pressed his arm without
speaking. David guessed her thoughts, and began at once to tell Lucien
about his own plans.

If Lucien was full of his troubles, the
lovers were quite as full of themselves. So absorbed were they, so
eager that Lucien should approve their happiness, that neither Eve nor
David so much as noticed his start of surprise at the news. Mme. de
Bargeton's lover had been dreaming of a great match for his sister; he
would reach a high position first, and then secure himself by an
alliance with some family of influence, and here was one more obstacle
in his way to success! His hopes were dashed to the ground. "If Mme. de
Bargeton consents to be Mme. de Rubempre, she would never care to have
David Sechard for a brother-in-law!"

This stated clearly and
precisely was the thought that tortured Lucien's inmost mind. "Louise
is right!" he thought bitterly. "A man with a career before him is
never understood by his family."

If the marriage had not been
announced immediately after Lucien's fancy had put M. de Bargeton to
death, he would have been radiant with heartfelt delight at the news.
If he had thought soberly over the probable future of a beautiful and
penniless girl like Eve Chardon, he would have seen that this marriage
was a piece of unhoped-for good fortune. But he was living just now in
a golden dream; he had soared above all barriers on the wings of an
_if_; he had seen a vision of himself, rising above society; and it was
painful to drop so suddenly down to hard fact.

Eve and David
both thought that their brother was overcome with the sense of such
generosity; to them, with their noble natures, the silent consent was a
sign of true friendship. David began to describe with kindly and
cordial eloquence the happy fortunes in store for them all. Unchecked
by protests put in by Eve, he furnished his first floor with a lover's
lavishness, built a second floor with boyish good faith for Lucien, and
rooms above the shed for Mme. Chardon--he meant to be a son to her. In
short, he made the whole family so happy and his brother-in-law so
independent, that Lucien fell under the spell of David's voice and
Eve's caresses; and as they went through the shadows beside the still
Charente, a gleam in the warm, star-lit night, he forgot the sharp
crown of thorns that had been pressed upon his head. "M. de Rubempre"
discovered David's real nature, in fact. His facile character returned
almost at once to the innocent, hard-working burgher life that he knew;
he saw it transfigured and free from care. The buzz of the aristocratic
world grew more and more remote; and when at length they came upon the
paved road of L'Houmeau, the ambitious poet grasped his brother's hand,
and made a third in the joy of the happy lovers.

"If only your father makes no objection to the marriage," he said.

"You
know how much he troubles himself about me; the old man lives for
himself," said David. "But I will go over to Marsac to-morrow and see
him, if it is only to ask leave to build."

David went back to
the house with the brother and sister, and asked Mme. Chardon's consent
to his marriage with the eagerness of a man who would fain have no
delay. Eve's mother took her daughter's hand, and gladly laid it in
David's; and the lover, grown bolder on this, kissed his fair betrothed
on the forehead, and she flushed red, and smiled at him.

"The
betrothal of the poor," the mother said, raising her eyes as if to pray
for heaven's blessing upon them.--"You are brave, my boy," she added,
looking at David, "but we have fallen on evil fortune, and I am afraid
lest our bad luck should be infectious."

"We shall be rich and
happy," David said earnestly. "To begin with, you must not go out
nursing any more, and you must come and live with your daughter and
Lucien in Angouleme."

The three began at once to tell the
astonished mother all their charming plans, and the family party gave
themselves up to the pleasure of chatting and weaving a romance, in
which it is so pleasant to enjoy future happiness, and to store the
unsown harvest. They had to put David out at the door; he could have
wished the evening to last for ever, and it was one o'clock in the
morning when Lucien and his future brother-in-law reached the Palet
Gate. The unwonted movement made honest Postel uneasy; he opened the
window, and looking through the Venetian shutters, he saw a light in
Eve's room.

"What can be happening at the Chardons'?" thought he, and seeing Lucien
come in, he called out to him--

"What is the matter, sonny? Do you want me to do anything?"

"No,
sir," returned the poet; "but as you are our friend, I can tell you
about it; my mother has just given her consent to my sister's
engagement to David Sechard."

For all answer, Postel shut the window with a bang, in despair that he
had not asked for Mlle. Chardon earlier.

David,
however, did not go back into Angouleme; he took the road to Marsac
instead, and walked through the night the whole way to his father's
house. He went along by the side of the croft just as the sun rose, and
caught sight of the old "bear's" face under an almond-tree that grew
out of the hedge.

"Good day, father," called David.

"Why,
is it you, my boy? How come you to be out on the road at this time of
day? There is your way in," he added, pointing to a little wicket gate.
"My vines have flowered and not a shoot has been frosted. There will be
twenty puncheons or more to the acre this year; but then look at all
the dung that has been put on the land!"

"Father, I have come on important business."

"Very well; how are your presses doing? You must be making heaps of
money as big as yourself."

"I shall some day, father, but I am not very well off just now."

"They
all tell me that I ought not to put on so much manure," replied his
father. "The gentry, that is M. le Marquis, M. le Comte, and Monsieur
What-do-you-call-'em, say that I am letting down the quality of the
wine. What is the good of book-learning except to muddle your wits?
Just you listen: these gentlemen get seven, or sometimes eight
puncheons of wine to the acre, and they sell them for sixty francs
apiece, that means four hundred francs per acre at most in a good year.
Now, I make twenty puncheons, and get thirty francs apiece for
them--that is six hundred francs! And where are they, the fools?
Quality, quality, what is quality to me? They can keep their quality
for themselves, these Lord Marquises. Quality means hard cash for me,
that is what it means, You were saying?----"

"I am going to be married, father, and I have come to ask for----"

"Ask
me for what? Nothing of the sort, my boy. Marry; I give you my consent,
but as for giving you anything else, I haven't a penny to bless myself
with. Dressing the soil is the ruin of me. These two years I have been
paying money out of pocket for top-dressing, and taxes, and expenses of
all kinds; Government eats up everything, nearly all the profit goes to
the Government. The poor growers have made nothing these last two
seasons. This year things don't look so bad; and, of course, the
beggarly puncheons have gone up to eleven francs already. We work to
put money into the coopers' pockets. Why, are you going to marry before
the vintage?----"

"I only came to ask for your consent, father."

"Oh! that is another thing. And who is the victim, if one may ask?"

"I am going to marry Mlle. Eve Chardon."

"Who may she be? What kind of victual does she eat?"

"She is the daughter of the late M. Chardon, the druggist in L'Houmeau."

"You
are going to marry a girl out of L'Houmeau! _you_! a burgess of
Angouleme, and printer to His Majesty! This is what comes of
book-learning! Send a boy to school, forsooth! Oh! well, then she is
very rich, is she, my boy?" and the old vinegrower came up closer with
a cajoling manner; "if you are marrying a girl out of L'Houmeau, it
must be because she has lots of cash, eh? Good! you will pay me my rent
now. There are two years and one-quarter owing, you know, my boy; that
is two thousand seven hundred francs altogether; the money will come
just in the nick of time to pay the cooper. If it was anybody else, I
should have a right to ask for interest; for, after all, business is
business, but I will let you off the interest. Well, how much has she?"

"Just as much as my mother had."

The
old vinegrower very nearly said, "Then she has only ten thousand
francs!" but he recollected just in time that he had declined to give
an account of her fortune to her son, and exclaimed, "She has nothing!"

"My mother's fortune was her beauty and intelligence," said David.

"You
just go into the market and see what you can get for it! Bless my
buttons! what bad luck parents have with their children. David, when I
married, I had a paper cap on my head for my whole fortune, and a pair
of arms; I was a poor pressman; but with the fine printing-house that I
gave you, with your industry, and your education, you might marry a
burgess' daughter, a woman with thirty or forty thousand francs. Give
up your fancy, and I will find you a wife myself. There is some one
about three miles away, a miller's widow, thirty-two years old, with a
hundred thousand francs in land. There is your chance! You can add her
property to Marsac, for they touch. Ah! what a fine property we should
have, and how I would look after it! They say she is going to marry her
foreman Courtois, but you are the better man of the two. I would look
after the mill, and she should live like a lady up in Angouleme."

"I am engaged, father."

"David,
you know nothing of business; you will ruin yourself, I see. Yes, if
you marry this girl out of L'Houmeau, I shall square accounts and
summons you for the rent, for I see that no good will come of this. Oh!
my presses, my poor presses! it took some money to grease you and keep
you going. Nothing but a good year can comfort me after this."

"It seems to me, father, that until now I have given you very little
trouble----"

"And paid mighty little rent," put in his parent.

"I came to ask you something else besides. Will you build a second
floor to your house, and some rooms above the shed?"

"Deuce
a bit of it; I have not the cash, and that you know right well.
Besides, it would be money thrown clean away, for what would it bring
in? Oh! you get up early of a morning to come and ask me to build you a
place that would ruin a king, do you? Your name may be David, but I
have not got Solomon's treasury. Why, you are mad! or they changed my
child at nurse. There is one for you that will have grapes on it," he
said, interrupting himself to point out a shoot. "Offspring of this
sort don't disappoint their parents; you dung the vines, and they repay
you for it. I sent you to school; I spent any amount of money to make a
scholar of you; I sent you to the Didots to learn your business; and
all this fancy education ends in a daughter-in-law out of L'Houmeau
without a penny to her name. If you had not studied books, if I had
kept you under my eye, you would have done as I pleased, and you would
be marrying a miller's widow this day with a hundred thousand francs in
hand, to say nothing of the mill. Oh! your cleverness leads you to
imagine that I am going to reward this fine sentiment by building
palaces for you, does it? . . . Really, anybody might think that the
house that has been a house these two hundred years was nothing but a
pigsty, not fit for the girl out of L'Houmeau to sleep in! What next!
She is the Queen of France, I suppose."

"Very well, father, I
will build the second floor myself; the son will improve his father's
property. It is not the usual way, but it happens so sometimes."

"What,
my lad! you can find money for building, can you, though you can't find
money to pay the rent, eh! You sly dog, to come round your father."

The
question thus raised was hard to lay, for the old man was only too
delighted to seize an opportunity of posing as a good father without
disbursing a penny; and all that David could obtain was his bare
consent to the marriage and free leave to do what he liked in the
house--at his own expense; the old "bear," that pattern of a thrifty
parent, kindly consenting not to demand the rent and drain the savings
to which David imprudently owned. David went back again in low spirits.
He saw that he could not reckon on his father's help in misfortune.

In
Angouleme that day people talked of nothing but the Bishop's epigram
and Mme. de Bargeton's reply. Every least thing that happened that
evening was so much exaggerated and embellished and twisted out of all
knowledge, that the poet became the hero of the hour. While this storm
in a teacup raged on high, a few drops fell among the _bourgeoisie_;
young men looked enviously after Lucien as he passed on his way through
Beaulieu, and he overheard chance phrases that filled him with conceit.

"There
is a lucky young fellow!" said an attorney's clerk, named Petit-Claud,
a plain-featured youth who had been at school with Lucien, and treated
him with small, patronizing airs.

"Yes, he certainly is,"
answered one of the young men who had been present on the occasion of
the reading; "he is a good-looking fellow, he has some brains, and Mme.
de Bargeton is quite wild about him."

Lucien had waited
impatiently until he could be sure of finding Louise alone. He had to
break the tidings of his sister's marriage to the arbitress of his
destinies. Perhaps after yesterday's soiree, Louise would be kinder
than usual, and her kindness might lead to a moment of happiness. So he
thought, and he was not mistaken; Mme. de Bargeton met him with a
vehemence of sentiment that seemed like a touching progress of passion
to the novice in love. She abandoned her hands, her beautiful golden
hair, to the burning kisses of the poet who had passed through such an
ordeal.

"If only you could have seen your face whilst you were
reading," cried Louise, using the familiar _tu_, the caress of speech,
since yesterday, while her white hands wiped the pearls of sweat from
the brows on which she set a poet's crown. "There were sparks of fire
in those beautiful eyes! From your lips, as I watched them, there fell
the golden chains that suspend the hearts of men upon the poet's mouth.
You shall read Chenier through to me from beginning to end; he is the
lover's poet. You shall not be unhappy any longer; I will not have it.
Yes, dear angel, I will make an oasis for you, there you shall live
your poet's life, sometimes busy, sometimes languid; indolent, full of
work, and musing by turns; but never forget that you owe your laurels
to me, let that thought be my noble guerdon for the sufferings which I
must endure. Poor love! the world will not spare me any more than it
has spared you; the world is avenged on all happiness in which it has
no share. Yes, I shall always be a mark for envy--did you not see that
last night? The bloodthirsty insects are quick enough to drain every
wound that they pierce. But I was happy; I lived. It is so long since
all my heartstrings vibrated."

The tears flowed fast, and for
all answer Lucien took Louise's hand and gave it a lingering kiss.
Every one about him soothed and caressed the poet's vanity; his mother
and his sister and David and Louise now did the same. Every one helped
to raise the imaginary pedestal on which he had set himself. His
friends's kindness and the fury of his enemies combined to establish
him more firmly in an ureal world. A young imagination readily falls in
with the flattering estimates of others, a handsome young fellow so
full of promise finds others eager to help him on every side, and only
after one or two sharp and bitter lessons does he begin to see himself
as an ordinary mortal.

"My beautiful Louise, do you mean in very truth to be my Beatrice, a
Beatrice who condescends to be loved?"

Louise raised the fine eyes, hitherto down-dropped.

"If
you show yourself worthy--some day!" she said, with an angelic smile
which belied her words. "Are you not happy? To be the sole possessor of
a heart, to speak freely at all times, with the certainty of being
understood, is not this happiness?"

"Yes," he answered, with a lover's pout of vexation.

"Child!"
she exclaimed, laughing at him. "Come, you have something to tell me,
have you not? You came in absorbed in thought, my Lucien."

Lucien,
in fear and trembling, confided to his beloved that David was in love
with his sister Eve, and that his sister Eve was in love with David,
and that the two were to be married shortly.

"Poor Lucien!" said
Louise, "he was afraid he should be beaten and scolded, as if it was he
himself that was going to be married! Why, where is the harm?" she
continued, her fingers toying with Lucien's hair. "What is your family
to me when you are an exception? Suppose that my father were to marry
his cook, would that trouble you much? Dear boy, lovers are for each
other their whole family. Have I a greater interest than my Lucien in
the world? Be great, find the way to win fame, that is our affair!"

This
selfish answer made Lucien the happiest of mortals. But in the middle
of the fantastic reasonings, with which Louise convinced him that they
two were alone in the world, in came M. de Bargeton. Lucien frowned and
seemed to be taken aback, but Louise made him a sign, and asked him to
stay to dinner and to read Andre de Chenier aloud to them until people
arrived for their evening game at cards.

"You will give her
pleasure," said M. de Bargeton, "and me also. Nothing suits me better
than listening to reading aloud after dinner."

Cajoled by M. de
Bargeton, cajoled by Louise, waited upon with the respect which
servants show to a favored guest of the house, Lucien remained in the
Hotel de Bargeton, and began to think of the luxuries which he enjoyed
for the time being as the rightful accessories of Lucien de Rubempre.
He felt his position so strong through Louise's love and M. de
Bargeton's weakness, that as the rooms filled, he assumed a lordly air,
which that fair lady encouraged. He tasted the delights of despotic
sway which Nais had acquired by right of conquest, and liked to share
with him; and, in short, that evening he tried to act up to the part of
the lion of the little town. A few of those who marked these airs drew
their own conclusions from them, and thought that, according to the old
expression, he had come to the last term with the lady. Amelie, who had
come with M. du Chatelet, was sure of the deplorable fact, in a corner
of the drawing-room, where the jealous and envious gathered together.

"Do
not think of calling Nais to account for the vanity of a youngster, who
is as proud as he can be because he has got into society, where he
never expected to set foot," said Chatelet. "Don't you see that this
Chardon takes the civility of a woman of the world for an advance? He
does not know the difference between the silence of real passion and
the patronizing graciousness due to his good looks and youth and
talent. It would be too bad if women were blamed for all the desires
which they inspire. _He_ certainly is in love with her, but as for
Nais----"

"Oh! Nais," echoed the perfidious Amelie, "Nais is
well enough pleased. A young man's love has so many attractions--at her
age. A woman grows young again in his company; she is a girl, and acts
a girl's hesitation and manners, and does not dream that she is
ridiculous. Just look! Think of a druggist's son giving himself a
conqueror's airs with Mme. de Bargeton."

"Love knows nought of high or low degree," hummed Adrien.

There
was not a single house in Angouleme next day where the degree of
intimacy between M. Chardon (alias de Rubempre) and Mme. de Bargeton
was not discussed; and though the utmost extent of their guilt amounted
to two or three kisses, the world already chose to believe the worst of
both. Mme. de Bargeton paid the penalty of her sovereignty. Among the
various eccentricities of society, have you never noticed its erratic
judgments and the unaccountable differences in the standard it requires
of this or that man or woman? There are some persons who may do
anything; they may behave totally irrationally, anything becomes them,
and it is who shall be first to justify their conduct; then, on the
other hand, there are those on whom the world is unaccountably severe,
they must do everything well, they are not allowed to fail nor to make
mistakes, at their peril they do anything foolish; you might compare
these last to the much-admired statues which must come down at once
from their pedestal if the frost chips off a nose or a finger. They are
not permitted to be human; they are required to be for ever divine and
for ever impeccable. So one glance exchanged between Mme. de Bargeton
and Lucien outweighed twelve years of Zizine's connection with Francis
in the social balance; and a squeeze of the hand drew down all the
thunders of the Charente upon the lovers.

David had brought a
little secret hoard back with him from Paris, and it was this sum that
he set aside for the expenses of his marriage and for the building of
the second floor in his father's house. His father's house it was; but,
after all, was he not working for himself? It would all be his again
some day, and his father was sixty-eight years old. So David build a
timbered second story for Lucien, so as not to put too great a strain
on the old rifted house-walls. He took pleasure in making the rooms
where the fair Eve was to spend her life as brave as might be.

It
was a time of blithe and unmixed happiness for the friends. Lucien was
tired of the shabbiness of provincial life, and weary of the sordid
frugality that looked on a five-franc piece as a fortune, but he bore
the hardships and the pinching thrift without grumbling. His moody
looks had been succeeded by an expression of radiant hope. He saw the
star shining above his head, he had dreams of a great time to come, and
built the fabric of his good fortune on M. de Bargeton's tomb. M. de
Bargeton, troubled with indigestion from time to time, cherished the
happy delusion that indigestion after dinner was a complaint to be
cured by a hearty supper.

By the beginning of September, Lucien
had ceased to be a printer's foreman; he was M. de Rubempre, housed
sumptuously in comparison with his late quarters in the tumbledown
attic with the dormer-window, where "young Chardon" had lived in
L'Houmeau; he was not even a "man of L'Houmeau"; he lived in the
heights of Angouleme, and dined four times a week with Mme. de
Bargeton. A friendship had grown up between M. de Rubempre and the
Bishop, and he went to the palace. His occupations put him upon a level
with the highest rank; his name would be one day among the great names
of France; and, in truth, as he went to and fro in his apartments, the
pretty sitting-room, the charming bedroom, and the tastefully furnished
study, he might console himself for the thought that he drew thirty
francs every month out of his mother's and sister's hard earnings; for
he saw the day approaching when _An Archer of Charles IX._, the
historical romance on which he had been at work for two years, and a
volume of verse entitled _Marguerites_, should spread his fame through
the world of literature, and bring in money enough to repay them all,
his mother and sister and David. So, grown great in his own eyes, and
giving ear to the echoes of his name in the future, he could accept
present sacrifices with noble assurance; he smiled at his poverty, he
relished the sense of these last days of penury.

Eve and David
had set Lucien's happiness before their own. They had put off their
wedding, for it took some time to paper and paint their rooms, and to
buy the furniture, and Lucien's affairs had been settled first. No one
who knew Lucien could wonder at their devotion. Lucien was so engaging,
he had such winning ways, his impatience and his desires were so
graciously expressed, that his cause was always won before he opened
his mouth to speak. This unlucky gift of fortune, if it is the
salvation of some, is the ruin of many more. Lucien and his like find a
world predisposed in favor of youth and good looks, and ready to
protect those who give it pleasure with the selfish good-nature that
flings alms to a beggar, if he appeals to the feelings and awakens
emotion; and in this favor many a grown child is content to bask
instead of putting it to a profitable use. With mistaken notions as to
the significance and the motive of social relations they imagine that
they shall always meet with deceptive smiles; and so at last the moment
comes for them when the world leaves them bald, stripped bare, without
fortune or worth, like an elderly coquette by the door of a salon, or a
stray rag in the gutter.

Eve herself had wished for the delay.
She meant to establish the little household on the most economical
footing, and to buy only strict necessaries; but what could two lovers
refuse to a brother who watched his sister at her work, and said in
tones that came from the heart, "How I wish I could sew!" The sober,
observant David had shared in the devotion; and yet, since Lucien's
triumph, David had watched him with misgivings; he was afraid that
Lucien would change towards them, afraid that he would look down upon
their homely ways. Once or twice, to try his brother, David had made
him choose between home pleasures and the great world, and saw that
Lucien gave up the delights of vanity for them, and exclaimed to
himself, "They will not spoil him for us!" Now and again the three
friends and Mme. Chardon arranged picnic parties in provincial
fashion--a walk in the woods along the Charente, not far from
Angouleme, and dinner out on the grass, David's apprentice bringing the
basket of provisions to some place appointed before-hand; and at night
they would come back, tired somewhat, but the whole excursion had not
cost three francs. On great occasion, when they dined at a _restaurat_,
as it is called, a sort of a country inn, a compromise between a
provincial wineshop and a Parisian _guinguette_, they would spend as
much as five francs, divided between David and the Chardons. David gave
his brother infinite credit for forsaking Mme. de Bargeton and grand
dinners for these days in the country, and the whole party made much of
the great man of Angouleme.

Matters had gone so far, that the
new home was very nearly ready, and David had gone over to Marsac to
persuade his father to come to the wedding, not without a hope that the
old man might relent at the sight of his daughter-in-law, and give
something towards the heavy expenses of the alterations, when there
befell one of those events which entirely change the face of things in
a small town.

Lucien and Louise had a spy in Chatelet, a spy who
watched, with the persistence of a hate in which avarice and passion
are blended, for an opportunity of making a scandal. Sixte meant that
Mme. de Bargeton should compromise herself with Lucien in such a way
that she should be "lost," as the saying goes; so he posed as Mme. de
Bargeton's humble confidant, admired Lucien in the Rue du Minage, and
pulled him to pieces everywhere else. Nais had gradually given him _les
petites entrees_, in the language of the court, for the lady no longer
mistrusted her elderly admirer; but Chatelet had taken too much for
granted--love was still in the Platonic stage, to the great despair of
Louise and Lucien.

There are, for that matter, love affairs
which start with a good or a bad beginning, as you prefer to take it.
Two creatures launch into the tactics of sentiment; they talk when they
should be acting, and skirmish in the open instead of settling down to
a siege. And so they grow tired of one another, expend their longings
in empty space; and, having time for reflection, come to their own
conclusions about each other. Many a passion that has taken the field
in gorgeous array, with colors flying and an ardor fit to turn the
world upside down, has turned home again without a victory, inglorious
and crestfallen, cutting but a foolish figure after these vain alarums
and excursions. Such mishaps are sometimes due to the diffidence of
youth, sometimes to the demurs of an inexperienced woman, for old
players at this game seldom end in a fiasco of this kind.

Provincial
life, moreover, is singularly well calculated to keep desire
unsatisfied and maintain a lover's arguments on the intellectual plane,
while, at the same time, the very obstacles placed in the way of the
sweet intercourse which binds lovers so closely each to each, hurry
ardent souls on towards extreme measures. A system of espionage of the
most minute and intricate kind underlies provincial life; every house
is transparent, the solace of close friendships which break no moral
law is scarcely allowed; and such outrageously scandalous constructions
are put upon the most innocent human intercourse, that many a woman's
character is taken away without cause. One here and there, weighed down
by her unmerited punishment, will regret that she has never known to
the full the forbidden felicity for which she is suffering. The world,
which blames and criticises with a superficial knowledge of the patent
facts in which a long inward struggle ends, is in reality a prime agent
in bringing such scandals about; and those whose voices are loudest in
condemnation of the alleged misconduct of some slandered woman never
give a thought to the immediate provocation of the overt step. That
step many a woman only takes after she has been unjustly accused and
condemned, and Mme. de Bargeton was now on the verge of this anomalous
position.

The obstacles at the outset of a passion of this kind
are alarming to inexperience, and those in the way of the two lovers
were very like the bonds by which the population of Lilliput throttled
Gulliver, a multiplicity of nothings, which made all movement
impossible, and baffle the most vehement desires. Mme. de Bargeton, for
instance, must always be visible. If she had denied herself to visitors
when Lucien was with her, it would have been all over with her; she
might as well have run away with him at once. It is true that they sat
in the boudoir, now grown so familiar to Lucien that he felt as if he
had a right to be there; but the doors stood scrupulously open, and
everything was arranged with the utmost propriety. M. de Bargeton
pervaded the house like a cockchafer; it never entered his head that
his wife could wish to be alone with Lucien. If he had been the only
person in the way, Nais could have got rid of him, sent him out of the
house, or given him something to do; but he was not the only one;
visitors flocked in upon her, and so much the more as curiosity
increased, for your provincial has a natural bent for teasing, and
delights to thwart a growing passion. The servants came and went about
the house promiscuously and without a summons; they had formed the
habits with a mistress who had nothing to conceal; any change now made
in her household ways was tantamount to a confession, and Angouleme
still hung in doubt.

Mme. de Bargeton could not set foot outside
her house but the whole town knew whither she was going. To take a walk
alone with Lucien out of Angouleme would have been a decided measure,
indeed; it would have been less dangerous to shut herself up with him
in the house. There would have been comments the next day if Lucien had
stayed on till midnight after the rooms were emptied. Within as without
her house, Mme. de Bargeton lived in public.

These details describe life in the provinces; an intrigue is either
openly avoided or impossible anywhere.

Like
all women carried away for the first time by passion, Louise discovered
the difficulties of her position one by one. They frightened her, and
her terror reacted upon the fond talk that fills the fairest hours
which lovers spend alone together. Mme. de Bargeton had no country
house whither she could take her beloved poet, after the manner of some
women who will forge ingenious pretexts for burying themselves in the
wilderness; but, weary of living in public, and pushed to extremities
by a tyranny which afforded no pleasures sweet enough to compensate for
the heaviness of the yoke, she even thought of Escarbas, and of going
to see her aged father--so much irritated was she by these paltry
obstacles.

Chatelet did not believe in such innocence. He lay in
wait, and watched Lucien into the house, and followed a few minutes
later, always taking M. de Chandour, the most indiscreet person in the
clique, along with him; and, putting that gentleman first, hoped to
find a surprise by such perseverance in pursuit of the chance. His own
part was a very difficult one to play, and its success was the more
doubtful because he was bound to appear neutral if he was to prompt the
other actors who were to play in his drama. So, to give himself a
countenance, he had attached himself to the jealous Amelie, the better
to lull suspicion in Lucien and in Mme. de Bargeton, who was not
without perspicacity. In order to spy upon the pair, he had contrived
of late to open up a stock controversy on the point with M. de
Chandour. Chatelet said that Mme. de Bargeton was simply amusing
herself with Lucien; she was too proud, too high-born, to stoop to the
apothecary's son. The role of incredulity was in accordance with the
plan which he had laid down, for he wished to appear as Mme. de
Bargeton's champion. Stanislas de Chandour held that Mme. de Bargeton
had not been cruel to her lover, and Amelie goaded them to argument,
for she longed to know the truth. Each stated his case, and (as not
unfrequently happens in small country towns) some intimate friends of
the house dropped in in the middle of the argument. Stanislas and
Chatelet vied with each other in backing up their opinions by
observations extremely pertinent. It was hardly to be expected that the
champions should not seek to enlist partisans. "What do you yourself
think?" they asked, each of his neighbor. These polemics kept Mme. de
Bargeton and Lucien well in sight.

At length one day Chatelet
called attention to the fact that whenever he went with M. de Chandour
to Mme. de Bargeton's and found Lucien there, there was not a sign nor
a trace of anything suspicious; the boudoir door stood open, the
servants came and went, there was nothing mysterious to betray the
sweet crime of love, and so forth and so forth. Stanislas, who did not
lack a certain spice of stupidity in his composition, vowed that he
would cross the room on tiptoe the next day, and the perfidious Amelie
held him to his bargain.

For Lucien that morrow was the day on
which a young man tugs out some of the hairs of his head, and inwardly
vows that he will give up the foolish business of sighing. He was
accustomed to his situation. The poet, who had seated himself so
bashfully in the boudoir-sanctuary of the queen of Angouleme, had been
transformed into an urgent lover. Six months had been enough to bring
him on a level with Louise, and now he would fain be her lord and
master. He left home with a settled determination to be extravagant in
his behavior; he would say that it was a matter of life or death to
him; he would bring all the resources of torrid eloquence into play; he
would cry that he had lost his head, that he could not think, could not
write a line. The horror that some women feel for premeditation does
honor to their delicacy; they would rather surrender upon the impulse
of passion, than in fulfilment of a contract. In general, prescribed
happiness is not the kind that any of us desire.

Mme. de
Bargeton read fixed purpose in Lucien's eyes and forehead, and in the
agitation in his face and manner, and proposed to herself to baffle
him, urged thereto partly by a spirit of contradiction, partly also by
an exalted conception of love. Being given to exaggeration, she set an
exaggerated value upon her person. She looked upon herself as a
sovereign lady, a Beatrice, a Laura. She enthroned herself, like some
dame of the Middle Ages, upon a dais, looking down upon the tourney of
literature, and meant that Lucien, as in duty bound, should win her by
his prowess in the field; he must eclipse "the sublime child," and
Lamartine, and Sir Walter Scott, and Byron. The noble creature regarded
her love as a stimulating power; the desire which she had kindled in
Lucien should give him the energy to win glory for himself. This
feminine Quixotry is a sentiment which hallows love and turns it to
worthy uses; it exalts and reverences love. Mme. de Bargeton having
made up her mind to play the part of Dulcinea in Lucien's life for
seven or eight years to come, desired, like many other provincials, to
give herself as the reward of prolonged service, a trial of constancy
which should give her time to judge her lover.

Lucien began the
strife by a piece of vehement petulence, at which a woman laughs so
long as she is heart-free, and saddens only when she loves; whereupon
Louise took a lofty tone, and began one of her long orations,
interlarded with high-sounding words.

"Was that your promise to
me, Lucien?" she said, as she made an end. "Do not sow regrets in the
present time, so sweet as it is, to poison my after life. Do not spoil
the future, and, I say it with pride, do not spoil the present! Is not
my whole heart yours? What more must you have? Can it be that your love
is influenced by the clamor of the senses, when it is the noblest
privilege of the beloved to silence them? For whom do you take me? Am I
not your Beatrice? If I am not something more than a woman for you, I
am less than a woman."

"That is just what you might say to a man if you cared nothing at all
for him," cried Lucien, frantic with passion.

"If you cannot feel all the sincere love underlying my ideas, you will
never be worthy of me."

"You
are throwing doubts on my love to dispense yourself from responding to
it," cried Lucien, and he flung himself weeping at her feet.

The
poor boy cried in earnest at the prospect of remaining so long at the
gate of paradise. The tears of the poet, who feels that he is humbled
through his strength, were mingled with childish crying for a plaything.

"You have never loved me!" he cried.

"You do not believe what you say," she answered, flattered by his
violence.

"Then give me proof that you are mine," said the disheveled poet.

Just
at that moment Stanislas came up unheard by either of the pair. He
beheld Lucien in tears, half reclining on the floor, with his head on
Louise's knee. The attitude was suspicious enough to satisfy Stanislas;
he turned sharply round upon Chatelet, who stood at the door of the
salon. Mme. de Bargeton sprang up in a moment, but the spies beat a
precipate retreat like intruders, and she was not quick enough for them.

"Who came just now?" she asked the servants.

"M. de Chandour and M. du Chatelet," said Gentil, her old footman.

Mme. de Bargeton went back, pale and trembling, to her boudoir.

"If they saw you just now, I am lost," she told Lucien.

"So much the better!" exclaimed the poet, and she smiled to hear the
cry, so full of selfish love.

A
story of this kind is aggravated in the provinces by the way in which
it is told. Everybody knew in a moment that Lucien had been detected at
Nais feet. M. de Chandour, elated by the important part he played in
the affair, went first to tell the great news at the club, and thence
from house to house, Chatelet hastening to say that _he_ had seen
nothing; but by putting himself out of court, he egged Stanislas on to
talk, he drew him on to add fresh details; and Stanislas, thinking
himself very witty, added a little to the tale every time that he told
it. Every one flocked to Amelie's house that evening, for by that time
the most exaggerated versions of the story were in circulation among
the Angouleme nobility, every narrator having followed Stanislas'
example. Women and men were alike impatient to know the truth; and the
women who put their hands before their faces and shrieked the loudest
were none other than Mesdames Amelie, Zephirine, Fifine, and Lolotte,
all with more or less heavy indictments of illicit love laid to their
charge. There were variations in every key upon the painful theme.

"Well,
well," said one of the ladies, "poor Nais! have you heard about it? I
do not believe it myself; she has a whole blameless record behind her;
she is far too proud to be anything but a patroness to M. Chardon.
Still, if it is true, I pity her with all my heart."

"She is all
the more to be pitied because she is making herself frightfully
ridiculous; she is old enough to be M. Lulu's mother, as Jacques called
him. The little poet it twenty-two at most; and Nais, between
ourselves, is quite forty."

"For my own part," said M. du
Chatelet, "I think that M. de Rubempre's position in itself proves
Nais' innocence. A man does not go down on his knees to ask for what he
has had already."

"That is as may be!" said Francis, with levity that brought Zephirine's
disapproving glance down on him.

"Do just tell us how it really was," they besought Stanislas, and
formed a small, secret committee in a corner of the salon.

Stanislas,
in the long length, had put together a little story full of facetious
suggestions, and accompanied it with pantomime, which made the thing
prodigiously worse.

"It is incredible!"

"At midday?"

"Nais was the last person whom I should have suspected!"

"What will she do now?"

Then
followed more comments, and suppositions without end. Chatelet took
Mme. de Bargeton's part; but he defended her so ill, that he stirred
the fire of gossip instead of putting it out.

Lili, disconsolate
over the fall of the fairest angel in the Angoumoisin hierarchy, went,
dissolved in tears, to carry the news to the palace. When the delighted
Chatelet was convinced that the whole town was agog, he went off to
Mme. de Bargeton's, where, alas! there was but one game of whist that
night, and diplomatically asked Nais for a little talk in the boudoir.
They sat down on the sofa, and Chatelet began in an undertone--

"You know what Angouleme is talking about, of course?"

"No."

"Very
well, I am too much your friend to leave you in ignorance. I am bound
to put you in a position to silence slanders, invented, no doubt, by
Amelie, who has the overweening audacity to regard herself as your
rival. I came to call on you this morning with that monkey of a
Stanislas; he was a few paces ahead of me, and he came so far"
(pointing to the door of the boudoir); "he says that he _saw_ you and
M. de Rubempre in such a position that he could not enter; he turned
round upon me, quite bewildered as I was, and hurried me away before I
had time to think; we were out in Beaulieu before he told me why he had
beaten a retreat. If I had known, I would not have stirred out of the
house till I had cleared up the matter and exonerated you, but it would
have proved nothing to go back again then.

"Now, whether
Stanislas' eyes deceived him, or whether he is right, _he must have
made a mistake_. Dear Nais, do not let that dolt trifle with your life,
your honor, your future; stop his mouth at once. You know my position
here. I have need of all these people, but still I am entirely yours.
Dispose of a life that belongs to you. You have rejected my prayers,
but my heart is always yours; I am ready to prove my love for you at
any time and in any way. Yes, I will watch over you like a faithful
servant, for no reward, but simply for the sake of the pleasure that it
is to me to do anything for you, even if you do not know of it. This
morning I have said everywhere that I was at the door of the salon, and
had seen nothing. If you are asked to give the name of the person who
told you about this gossip, pray make use of me. I should be very proud
to be your acknowledged champion; but, between ourselves, M. de
Bargeton is the proper person to ask Stanislas for an explanation. . .
. Suppose that young Rubempre had behaved foolishly, a woman's
character ought not to be at the mercy of the first hare-brained boy
who flings himself at her feet. That is what I have been saying."

Nais
bowed in acknowledgment, and looked thoughtful. She was weary to
disgust of provincial life. Chatelet had scarcely begun before her mind
turned to Paris. Meanwhile Mme. de Bargeton's adorer found the silence
somewhat awkward.

"Dispose of me, I repeat," he added.

"Thank you," answered the lady.

"What do you think of doing?"

"I shall see."

A prolonged pause.

"Are you so fond of that young Rubempre?"

A
proud smile stole over her lips, she folded her arms, and fixed her
gaze on the curtains. Chatelet went out; he could not read that high
heart.

Later in the evening, when Lucien had taken his leave,
and likewise the four old gentlemen who came for their whist, without
troubling themselves about ill-founded tittle-tattle, M. de Bargeton
was preparing to go to bed, and had opened his mouth to bid his wife
good-night, when she stopped him.

"Come here, dear, I have something to say to you," she said, with a
certain solemnity.

M. de Bargeton followed her into the boudoir.

"Perhaps
I have done wrongly," she said, "to show a warm interest in M. de
Rubempre, which he, as well as the stupid people here in the town, has
misinterpreted. This morning Lucien threw himself here at my feet with
a declaration, and Stanislas happened to come in just as I told the boy
to get up again. A woman, under any circumstances, has claims which
courtesy prescribes to a gentleman; but in contempt of these, Stanislas
has been saying that he came unexpectedly and found us in an equivocal
position. I was treating the boy as he deserved. If the young
scatterbrain knew of the scandal caused by his folly, he would go, I am
convinced, to insult Stanislas, and compel him to fight. That would
simply be a public proclamation of his love. I need not tell you that
your wife is pure; but if you think, you will see that it is something
dishonoring for both you and me if M. de Rubempre defends her. Go at
once to Stanislas and ask him to give you satisfaction for his
insulting language; and mind, you must not accept any explanation short
of a full and public retraction in the presence of witnesses of credit.
In this way you will win back the respect of all right-minded people;
you will behave like a man of spirit and a gentleman, and you will have
a right to my esteem. I shall send Gentil on horseback to the Escarbas;
my father must be your second; old as he is, I know that he is the man
to trample this puppet under foot that has smirched the reputation of a
Negrepelisse. You have the choice of weapons, choose pistols; you are
an admirable shot."

"I am going," said M. de Bargeton, and he took his hat and his walking
cane.

"Good,
that is how I like a man to behave, dear; you are a gentleman," said
his wife. She felt touched by his conduct, and made the old man very
happy and proud by putting up her forehead for a kiss. She felt
something like a maternal affection for the great child; and when the
carriage gateway had shut with a clang behind him, the tears came into
her eyes in spite of herself.

"How he loves me!" she thought. "He clings to life, poor, dear man, and
yet he would give his life for me."

It
did not trouble M. de Bargeton that he must stand up and face his man
on the morrow, and look coolly into the muzzle of a pistol pointed
straight at him; no, only one thing in the business made him feel
uncomfortable, and on the way to M. de Chandour's house he quaked
inwardly.

"What shall I say?" he thought within himself; "Nais
really ought to have told me what to say," and the good gentleman
racked his brains to compose a speech that should not be ridiculous.

But
people of M. de Bargeton's stamp, who live perforce in silence because
their capacity is limited and their outlook circumscribed, often behave
at great crises with a ready-made solemnity. If they say little, it
naturally follows that they say little that is foolish; their extreme
lack of confidence leads them to think a good deal over the remarks
that they are obliged to make; and, like Balaam's ass, they speak
marvelously to the point if a miracle loosens their tongues. So M. de
Bargeton bore himself like a man of uncommon sense and spirit, and
justified the opinion of those who held that he was a philosopher of
the school of Pythagoras.

He reached Stanislas' house at nine
o'clock, bowed silently to Amelie before a whole room full of people,
and greeted others in turn with that simple smile of his, which under
the present circumstances seemed profoundly ironical. There followed a
great silence, like the pause before a storm. Chatelet had made his way
back again, and now looked in a very significant fashion from M. de
Bargeton to Stanislas, whom the injured gentleman accosted politely.

Chatelet
knew what a visit meant at this time of night, when old M. de Bargeton
was invariably in his bed. It was evidently Nais who had set the feeble
arm in motion. Chatelet was on such a footing in that house that he had
some right to interfere in family concerns. He rose to his feet and
took M. de Bargeton aside, saying, "Do you wish to speak to Stanislas?"

"Yes," said the old gentleman, well pleased to find a go-between who
perhaps might say his say for him.

"Very
well; go into Amelie's bedroom," said the controller of excise,
likewise well pleased at the prospect of a duel which possibly might
make Mme. de Bargeton a widow, while it put a bar between her and
Lucien, the cause of the quarrel. Then Chatelet went to M. de Chandour.

"Stanislas,"
he said, "here comes Bargeton to call you to account, no doubt, for the
things you have been saying about Nais. Go into your wife's room, and
behave, both of you, like gentlemen. Keep the thing quiet, and make a
great show of politeness, behave with phlegmatic British dignity, in
short."

In another minute Stanislas and Chatelet went to Bargeton.

"Sir," said the injured husband, "do you say that you discovered Mme.
de Bargeton and M. de Rubempre in an equivocal position?"

"M. Chardon," corrected Stanislas, with ironical stress; he did not
take Bargeton seriously.

"So
be it," answered the other. "If you do not withdraw your assertions at
once before the company now in your house, I must ask you to look for a
second. My father-in-law, M. de Negrepelisse, will wait upon you at
four o'clock to-morrow morning. Both of us may as well make our final
arrangements, for the only way out of the affair is the one that I have
indicated. I choose pistols, as the insulted party."

This was
the speech that M. de Bargeton had ruminated on the way; it was the
longest that he had ever made in life. He brought it out without
excitement or vehemence, in the simplest way in the world. Stanislas
turned pale. "After all, what did I see?" said he to himself.

Put
between the shame of eating his words before the whole town, and fear,
that caught him by the throat with burning fingers; confronted by this
mute personage, who seemed in no humor to stand nonsense, Stanislas
chose the more remote peril.

"All right. To-morrow morning," he said, thinking that the matter might
be arranged somehow or other.

The
three went back to the room. Everybody scanned their faces as they came
in; Chatelet was smiling, M. de Bargeton looked exactly as if he were
in his own house, but Stanislas looked ghastly pale. At the sight of
his face, some of the women here and there guessed the nature of the
conference, and the whisper, "They are going to fight!" circulated from
ear to ear. One-half of the room was of the opinion that Stanislas was
in the wrong, his white face and his demeanor convicted him of a lie;
the other half admired M. de Bargeton's attitude. Chatelet was solemn
and mysterious. M. de Bargeton stayed a few minutes, scrutinized
people's faces, and retired.

"Have you pistols?" Chatelet asked in a whisper of Stanislas, who shook
from head to foot.

Amelie
knew what it all meant. She felt ill, and the women flocked about her
to take her into her bedroom. There was a terrific sensation; everybody
talked at once. The men stopped in the drawing-room, and declared, with
one voice, that M. de Bargeton was within his right.

"Would you have thought the old fogy capable of acting like this?"
asked M. de Saintot.

"But
he was a crack shot when he was young," said the pitiless Jacques. "My
father often used to tell me of Bargeton's exploits."

"Pooh! Put
them at twenty paces, and they will miss each other if you give them
cavalry pistols," said Francis, addressing Chatelet.

Chatelet
stayed after the rest had gone to reassure Stanislas and his wife, and
to explain that all would go off well. In a duel between a man of sixty
and a man of thirty-five, all the advantage lay with the latter.

Early
next morning, as Lucien sat at breakfast with David, who had come back
alone from Marsac, in came Mme. Chardon with a scared face.

"Well,
Lucien," she said, "have you heard the news? Everyone is talking of it,
even the people in the market. M. de Bargeton all but killed M. de
Chandour this morning in M. Tulloy's meadow; people are making puns on
the name. (Tue Poie.) It seems that M. de Chandour said that he found
you with Mme. de Bargeton yesterday."

"It is a lie! Mme. de Bargeton is innocent," cried Lucien.

"I
heard about the duel from a countryman, who saw it all from his cart.
M. de Negrepelisse came over at three o'clock in the morning to be M.
de Bargeton's second; he told M. de Chandour that if anything happened
to his son-in-law, he should avenge him. A cavalry officer lent the
pistols. M. de Negrepelisse tried them over and over again. M. du
Chatelet tried to prevent them from practising with the pistols, but
they referred the question to the officer; and he said that, unless
they meant to behave like children, they ought to have pistols in
working order. The seconds put them at twenty-five paces. M. de
Bargeton looked as if he had just come out for a walk. He was the first
to fire; the ball lodged in M. de Chandour's neck, and he dropped
before he could return the shot. The house-surgeon at the hospital has
just said that M. de Chandour will have a wry neck for the rest of his
days. I came to tell you how it ended, lest you should go to Mme. de
Bargeton's or show yourself in Angouleme, for some of M. de Chandour's
friends might call you out."

As she spoke, the apprentice
brought in Gentil, M. de Bargeton's footman. The man had come with a
note for Lucien; it was from Louise.

"You have doubtless heard
the news," she wrote, "of the duel between Chandour and my husband. We
shall not be at home to any one to-day. Be careful; do not show
yourself. I ask this in the name of the affection you bear me. Do you
not think that it would be best to spend this melancholy day in
listening to your Beatrice, whose whole life has been changed by this
event, who has a thousand things to say to you?"

"Luckily, my
marriage is fixed for the day after to-morrow," said David, "and you
will have an excuse for not going to see Mme. de Bargeton quite so
often."

"Dear David," returned Lucien, "she asks me to go to her
to-day; and I ought to do as she wishes, I think; she knows better than
we do how I should act in the present state of things."

"Then is everything ready here?" asked Mme. Chardon.

"Come
and see," cried David, delighted to exhibit the transformation of the
first floor. Everything there was new and fresh; everything was
pervaded by the sweet influences of early married days, still crowned
by the wreath of orange blossoms and the bridal veil; days when the
springtide of love finds its reflection in material things, and
everything is white and spotless and has not lost its bloom.

"Eve's home will be fit for a princess," said the mother, "but you have
spent too much, you have been reckless."

David
smiled by way of answer. But Mme. Chardon had touched the sore spot in
a hidden wound which caused the poor lover cruel pangs. The cost of
carrying out his ideas had far exceeded his estimates; he could not
afford to build above the shed. His mother-in-law must wait awhile for
the home he had meant to make for her. There is nothing more keenly
painful to a generous nature than a failure to keep such promises as
these; it is like mortification to the little vanities of affection, as
they may be styled. David sedulously hid his embarrassment to spare
Lucien; he was afraid that Lucien might be overwhelmed by the
sacrifices made for his sake.

"Eve and her girl friends have
been working very hard, too," said Mme. Chardon. "The wedding clothes
and the house linen are all ready. The girls are so fond of her, that,
without letting her know about it, they have covered the mattresses
with white twill and a rose-colored piping at the edges. So pretty! It
makes one wish one were going to be married."

Mother and
daughter had spent all their little savings to furnish David's home
with the things of which a young bachelor never thinks. They knew that
he was furnishing with great splendor, for something had been said
about ordering a dinner-service from Limoges, and the two women had
striven to make Eve's contributions to the housekeeping worthy of
David's. This little emulation in love and generosity could but bring
the husband and wife into difficulties at the very outset of their
married life, with every sign of homely comfort about them, comfort
that might be regarded as positive luxury in a place so behind the
times as the Angouleme of those days.

As soon as Lucien saw his
mother and David enter the bedroom with the blue-and-white draperies
and neat furniture that he knew, he slipped away to Mme. de Bargeton.
He found Nais at table with her husband; M. de Bargeton's early morning
walk had sharpened his appetite, and he was breakfasting quite
unconcernedly after all that had passed. Lucien saw the dignified face
of M. de Negrepelisse, the old provincial noble, a relic of the old
French _noblesse_, sitting beside Nais.

When Gentil announced M.
de Rubempre, the white-headed old man gave him a keen, curious glance;
the father was anxious to form his own opinions of this man whom his
daughter had singled out for notice. Lucien's extreme beauty made such
a vivid impression upon him, that he could not repress an approving
glance; but at the same time he seemed to regard the affair as a
flirtation, a mere passing fancy on his daughter's part. Breakfast
over, Louise could leave her father and M. de Bargeton together; she
beckoned Lucien to follow her as she withdrew.

"Dear," she said,
and the tones of her voice were half glad, half melancholy, "I am going
to Paris, and my father is taking Bargeton back with him to the
Escarbas, where he will stay during my absence. Mme. d'Espard (she was
a Blamont-Chauvry before her marriage) has great influence herself, and
influential relations. The d'Espards are connections of ours; they are
the older branch of the Negrepelisses; and if she vouchsafes to
acknowledge the relationship, I intend to cultivate her a good deal;
she may perhaps procure a place for Bargeton. At my solicitation, it
might be desired at Court that he should represent the Charente, and
that would be a step towards his election here. If he were a deputy, it
would further other steps that I wish to take in Paris. You, my
darling, have brought about this change in my life. After this
morning's duel, I am obliged to shut up my house for some time; for
there will be people who will side with the Chandours against us. In
our position, and in a small town, absence is the only way of softening
down bad feeling. But I shall either succeed, and never see Angouleme
again, or I shall not succeed, and then I mean to wait in Paris until
the time comes when I can spend my summers at the Escarbas and the
winters in Paris. It is the only life for a woman of quality, and I
have waited too long before entering upon it. The one day will be
enough for our preparations; to-morrow night I shall set out, and you
are coming with me, are you not? You shall start first. I will overtake
you between Mansle and Ruffec, and we shall soon be in Paris. There,
beloved, is the life for a man who has anything in him. We are only at
our ease among our equals; we are uncomfortable in any other society.
Paris, besides, is the capital of the intellectual world, the stage on
which you will succeed; overleap the gulf that separates us quickly.
You must not allow your ideas to grow rancid in the provinces; put
yourself into communication at once with the great men who represent
the nineteenth century. Try to stand well with the Court and with those
in power. No honor, no distinction, comes to seek out the talent that
perishes for lack of light in a little town; tell me, if you can, the
name of any great work of art executed in the provinces! On the
contrary, see how Jean-Jacques, himself sublime in his poverty, felt
the irresistible attraction of that sun of the intellectual world,
which produces ever-new glories and stimulates the intellect--Paris,
where men rub against one another. What is it but your duty to hasten
to take your place in the succession of pleiades that rise from
generation to generation? You have no idea how it contributes to the
success of a clever young man to be brought into a high light, socially
speaking. I will introduce you to Mme. d'Espard; it is not easy to get
into her set; but you meet all the greatest people at her house,
Cabinet ministers and ambassadors, and great orators from the Chamber
of Deputies, and peers and men of influence, and wealthy or famous
people. A young man with good looks and more than sufficient genius
could fail to excite interest only by very bad management.

"There
is no pettiness about those who are truly great; they will lend you
their support; and when you yourself have a high position, your work
will rise immensely in public opinion. The great problem for the artist
is the problem of putting himself in evidence. In these ways there will
be hundreds of chances of making your way, of sinecures, of a pension
from the civil list. The Bourbons are so fond of encouraging letters
and the arts, and you therefore must be a religious poet and a Royalist
poet at the same time. Not only is it the right course, but it is the
way to get on in life. Do the Liberals and the Opposition give places
and rewards, and make the fortunes of men of letters? Take the right
road and reach the goal of genius. You have my secret, do not breathe a
syllable of it, and prepare to follow me.--Would you rather not go?"
she added, surprised that her lover made no answer.

To Lucien,
listening to the alluring words, and bewildered by the rapid bird's-eye
view of Paris which they brought before him, it seemed as if hitherto
he had been using only half his brain and suddenly had found the other
half, so swiftly his ideas widened. He saw himself stagnating in
Angouleme like a frog under a stone in a marsh. Paris and her splendors
rose before him; Paris, the Eldorado of provincial imaginings, with
golden robes and the royal diadem about her brows, and arms
outstretched to talent of every kind. Great men would greet him there
as one of their order. Everything smiled upon genius. There, there were
no jealous booby-squires to invent stinging gibes and humiliate a man
of letters; there was no stupid indifference to poetry in Paris. Paris
was the fountain-head of poetry; there the poet was brought into the
light and paid for his work. Publishers should no sooner read the
opening pages of _An Archer of Charles IX._ than they should open their
cash-boxes with "How much do you want?" And besides all this, he
understood that this journey with Mme. de Bargeton would virtually give
her to him; that they should live together.

So at the words,
"Would you rather not go?" tears came into his eyes, he flung his arms
about Louise, held her tightly to his heart, and marbled her throat
with impassioned kisses. Suddenly he checked himself, as if memory had
dealt him a blow.

"Great heavens!" he cried, "my sister is to be married on the day after
to-morrow!"

That
exclamation was the last expiring cry of noble and single-hearted
boyhood. The so-powerful ties that bind young hearts to home, and a
first friendship, and all early affections, were to be severed at one
ruthless blow.

"Well," cried the haughty Negrepelisse, "and what
has your sister's marriage to do with the progress of our love? Have
you set your mind so much on being best man at a wedding party of
tradespeople and workingmen, that you cannot give up these exalted joys
for my sake? A great sacrifice, indeed!" she went on, scornfully. "This
morning I sent my husband out to fight in your quarrel. There, sir, go;
I am mistaken in you."

She sank fainting upon the sofa. Lucien
went to her, entreating her pardon, calling execrations upon his
family, his sister, and David.

"I had such faith in you!" she
said. "M. de Cante-Croix had an adored mother; but to win a letter from
me, and the words, 'I am satisfied,' he fell in the thick of the fight.
And now, when I ask you to take a journey with me, you cannot think of
giving up a wedding dinner for my sake."

Lucien was ready to
kill himself; his desperation was so unfeigned, that Louise forgave
him, though at the same time she made him feel that he must redeem his
mistake.

"Come, come," she said, "be discreet, and to-morrow at midnight be upon
the road, a hundred paces out of Mansle."

Lucien
felt the globe shrink under his feet; he went back to David's house,
hopes pursuing him as the Furies followed Orestes, for he had
glimmerings of endless difficulties, all summed up in the appalling
words, "Where is the money to come from?"

He stood in such
terror of David's perspicacity, that he locked himself into his pretty
new study until he could recover himself, his head was swimming in this
new position. So he must leave the rooms just furnished for him at such
a cost, and all the sacrifices that had been made for him had been made
in vain. Then it occurred to Lucien that his mother might take the
rooms and save David the heavy expense of building at the end of the
yard, as he had meant to do; his departure would be, in fact, a
convenience to the family. He discovered any quantity of urgent reasons
for his sudden flight; for there is no such Jesuit as the desire of
your heart. He hurried down at once to tell the news to his sister in
L'Houmeau and to take counsel with her. As he reached Postel's shop, he
bethought himself that if all other means failed, he could borrow
enough to live upon for a year from his father's successor.

"Three
francs per day will be abundance for me if I live with Louise," he
thought; "it is only a thousand francs for a whole year. And in six
months' time I shall have plenty of money."

Then, under seal and
promise of secrecy, Eve and her mother heard Lucien's confidences. Both
the women began to cry as they heard of the ambitious plans; and when
he asked the reason of their trouble, they told him that every penny
they possessed had been spent on table-linen, house-linen, Eve's
wedding clothes, and on a host of things that David had overlooked.
They had been so glad to do this, for David had made a
marriage-settlement of ten thousand francs on Eve. Lucien then spoke of
his idea of a loan, and Mme. Chardon undertook to ask M. Postel to lend
them a thousand francs for a twelve-month.

"But, Lucien," said
Eve, as a thought clutched at her heart, "you will not be here at my
wedding! Oh! come back, I will put it off for a few days. Surely she
will give you leave to come back in a fortnight, if only you go with
her now? Surely, she would spare you to us for a week, Lucien, when we
brought you up for her? We shall have no luck if you are not at the
wedding. . . . But will a thousand francs be enough for you?" she
asked, suddenly interrupting herself. "Your coat suits you divinely,
but you have only that one! You have only two fine shirts, the other
six are coarse linen; and three of your white ties are just common
muslin, there are only two lawn cravats, and your pocket-handkerchiefs
are not good ones. Where will you find a sister in Paris who will get
up your linen in one day as you want it? You will want ever so much
more. Then you have just the one pair of new nankeen trousers, last
year's trousers are tight for you; you will be obliged to have clothes
made in Paris, and Paris prices are not like Angouleme prices. You have
only two presentable white waistcoats; I have mended the others
already. Come, I advise you to take two thousand francs."

David came in as she spoke, and apparently heard the last two words,
for he looked at the brother and sister and said nothing.

"Do not keep anything from me," he said at last.

"Well," exclaimed Eve, "he is going away with _her_."

Mme. Chardon came in again, and, not seeing David, began at once:

"Postel
is willing to lend you the thousand francs, Lucien," she said, "but
only for six months; and even then he wants you to let him have a bill
endorsed by your brother-in-law, for he says that you are giving him no
security."

She turned and saw David, and there was a deep
silence in the room. The Chardons thought how they had abused David's
goodness, and felt ashamed. Tears stood in the young printer's eyes.

"Then
you will not be here at our wedding," he began. "You are not going to
live with us! And here have I been squandering all that I had! Oh!
Lucien, as I came along, bringing Eve her little bits of wedding
jewelry, I did not think that I should be sorry I spent the money on
them." He brushed his hand over his eyes as he drew the little cases
from his pocket.

He set down the tiny morocco-covered boxes on the table in front of his
mother-in-law.

"Oh! why do you think so much for me?" protested Eve, giving him a
divinely sweet smile that belied her words.

"Mamma,
dear," said David, "just tell M. Postel that I will put my name to the
bill, for I can tell from your face, Lucien, that you have quite made
up your mind to go."

Lucien's head sank dejectedly; there was a little pause, then he said,
"Do not think hardly of me, my dear, good angels."

He
put his arms about Eve and David, and drew them close, and held them
tightly to him as he added, "Wait and see what comes of it, and you
shall know how much I love you. What is the good of our high thinking,
David, if it does not enable us to disregard the petty ceremonial in
which the law entangles our affections? Shall I not be with you in
spirit, in spite of the distance between us? Shall we not be united in
thought? Have I not a destiny to fulfil? Will publishers come here to
seek my _Archer of Charles IX._ and the _Marguerites_? A little sooner
or a little later I shall be obliged in any case to do as I am doing
to-day, should I not? And shall I ever find a better opportunity than
this? Does not my success entirely depend upon my entrance on life in
Paris through the Marquise d'Espard's salon?"

"He is right," said Eve; "you yourself were saying, were you not, that
he ought to go to Paris at once?"

David took Eve's hand in his, and drew her into the narrow little room
where she had slept for seven years.

"Love,
you were saying just now that he would want two thousand francs?" he
said in her ear. "Postel is only lending one thousand."

Eve gave her betrothed a look, and he read all her anguish in her eyes.

"Listen,
my adored Eve, we are making a bad start in life. Yes, my expenses have
taken all my capital; I have just two thousand francs left, and half of
it will be wanted to carry on the business. If we give your brother the
thousand francs, it will mean that we are giving away our bread, that
we shall live in anxiety. If I were alone, I know what I should do; but
we are two. Decide for us."

Eve, distracted, sprang to her lover's arms, and kissed him tenderly,
as she answered through her tears:

"Do as you would do if you were alone; I will work to earn the money."

In
spite of the most impassioned kiss ever given and taken by betrothed
lovers, David left Eve overcome with trouble, and went out to Lucien.

"Do not worry yourself," he said; "you shall have your two thousand
francs."

"Go in to see Postel," said Mme. Chardon, "for you must both give your
signatures to the bill."

When
Lucien and David came back again unexpectedly, they found Eve and her
mother on their knees in prayer. The women felt sure that Lucien's
return would bring the realization of many hopes; but at the moment
they could only feel how much they were losing in the parting, and the
happiness to come seemed too dearly bought by an absence that broke up
their life together, and would fill the coming days with innumerable
fears for Lucien.

"If you could ever forget this sight," David said in Lucien's ear, "you
would be the basest of men."

David,
no doubt, thought that these brave words were needed; Mme. de
Bargeton's influence seemed to him less to be feared than his friend's
unlucky instability of character, Lucien was so easily led for good or
evil. Eve soon packed Lucien's clothes; the Fernando Cortez of
literature carried but little baggage. He was wearing his best
overcoat, his best waistcoat, and one of the two fine shirts. The whole
of his linen, the celebrated coat, and his manuscript made up so small
a package that to hide it from Mme. de Bargeton, David proposed to send
it by coach to a paper merchant with whom he had dealings, and wrote
and advised him to that effect, and asked him to keep the parcel until
Lucien sent for it.

In spite of Mme. de Bargeton's precautions,
Chatelet found out that she was leaving Angouleme; and with a view to
discovering whether she was traveling alone or with Lucien, he sent his
man to Ruffec with instructions to watch every carriage that changed
horses at that stage.

"If she is taking her poet with her," thought he, "I have her now."

Lucien
set out before daybreak the next morning. David went with him. David
had hired a cabriolet, pretending that he was going to Marsac on
business, a little piece of deception which seemed probable under the
circumstances. The two friends went to Marsac, and spent part of the
day with the old "bear." As evening came on they set out again, and in
the beginning of the dawn they waited in the road, on the further side
of Mansle, for Mme. de Bargeton. When the seventy-year old traveling
carriage, which he had many a time seen in the coach-house, appeared in
sight, Lucien felt more deeply moved than he had ever been in his life
before; he sprang into David's arms.

"God grant that this may be
for your good!" said David, and he climbed into the shabby cabriolet
and drove away with a feeling of dread clutching at his heart; he had
terrible presentiments of the fate awaiting Lucien in Paris.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Bargeton, Madame de (see Chatelet, Baronne du)

Cerizet Eve and David A Man of Business Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
The Middle Classes

Chardon, Madame (nee Rubempre) Eve and David Scenes from a Courtesan's
Life

Chatelet, Sixte, Baron du A Distinguished Provincial at Paris Scenes
from a Courtesan's Life The Thirteen

Chatelet, Marie-Louise-Anais de Negrepelisse, Baronne du A
Distinguished Provincial at Paris The Government Clerks

Cointet, Boniface Eve and David The Firm of Nucingen The Member for
Arcis

Cointet, Jean Eve and David

Courtois Eve and David

Courtois, Madame Eve and David

Desplein
The Atheist's Mass Cousin Pons The Thirteen The Government Clerks
Pierrette A Bachelor's Establishment The Seamy Side of History Modeste
Mignon Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine

Gentil A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

Grozier, Abbe The Commission in Lunacy

Hautoy, Francis du Eve and David

Maucombe, Comte de

Letters of Two Brides

Montriveau,
General Marquis Armand de The Thirteen Father Goriot A Distinguished
Provincial at Paris Another Study of Woman Pierrette The Member for
Arcis

Negrepelisse, De The Commission in Lunacy A Distinguished Provincial at
Paris

Petit-Claud Eve and David

Pimentel, Marquis and Marquise de Eve and David

Postel Eve and David

Prieur, Madame Eve and David

Rastignac, Baron and Baronne de (Eugene's parents) Father Goriot

Rastignac, Laure-Rose and Agathe de Father Goriot The Member for Arcis

Rubempre,
Lucien-Chardon de Eve and David A Distinguished Provincial at Paris The
Government Clerks Ursule Mirouet Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Sechard, Jerome-Nicolas Eve and David

Sechard, David Eve and David A Distinguished Provincial At Paris Scenes
from a Courtesan's Life

Sechard, Madame David Eve and David A Distinguished Provincial At Paris
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Senonches, Jacques de Eve and David

Senonches, Madame Jacques de Eve and David

Stanhope, Lady Esther The Lily of the Valley

II

A DISTINGUISHED PROVINCIAL AT PARIS (Lost Illusions Part II)

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Ellen Marriage

PART I

Mme.
de Bargeton and Lucien de Rubempre had left Angouleme behind, and were
traveling together upon the road to Paris. Not one of the party who
made that journey alluded to it afterwards; but it may be believed that
an infatuated youth who had looked forward to the delights of an
elopement, must have found the continual presence of Gentil, the
man-servant, and Albertine, the maid, not a little irksome on the way.
Lucien, traveling post for the first time in his life, was horrified to
see pretty nearly the whole sum on which he meant to live in Paris for
a twelvemonth dropped along the road. Like other men who combine great
intellectual powers with the charming simplicity of childhood, he
openly expressed his surprise at the new and wonderful things which he
saw, and thereby made a mistake. A man should study a woman very
carefully before he allows her to see his thoughts and emotions as they
arise in him. A woman, whose nature is large as her heart is tender,
can smile upon childishness, and make allowances; but let her have ever
so small a spice of vanity herself, and she cannot forgive
childishness, or littleness, or vanity in her lover. Many a woman is so
extravagant a worshiper that she must always see the god in her idol;
but there are yet others who love a man for his sake and not for their
own, and adore his failings with his greater qualities.

Lucien
had not guessed as yet that Mme. de Bargeton's love was grafted on
pride. He made another mistake when he failed to discern the meaning of
certain smiles which flitted over Louise's lips from time to time; and
instead of keeping himself to himself, he indulged in the playfulness
of the young rat emerging from his hole for the first time.

The
travelers were set down before daybreak at the sign of the
Gaillard-Bois in the Rue de l'Echelle, both so tired out with the
journey that Louise went straight to bed and slept, first bidding
Lucien to engage the room immediately overhead. Lucien slept on till
four o'clock in the afternoon, when he was awakened by Mme. de
Bargeton's servant, and learning the hour, made a hasty toilet and
hurried downstairs.

Louise was sitting in the shabby inn
sitting-room. Hotel accommodation is a blot on the civilization of
Paris; for with all its pretensions to elegance, the city as yet does
not boast a single inn where a well-to-do traveler can find the
surroundings to which he is accustomed at home. To Lucien's
just-awakened, sleep-dimmed eyes, Louise was hardly recognizable in
this cheerless, sunless room, with the shabby window-curtains, the
comfortless polished floor, the hideous furniture bought second-hand,
or much the worse for wear.

Some people no longer look the same
when detached from the background of faces, objects, and surroundings
which serve as a setting, without which, indeed, they seem to lose
something of their intrinsic worth. Personality demands its appropriate
atmosphere to bring out its values, just as the figures in Flemish
interiors need the arrangement of light and shade in which they are
placed by the painter's genius if they are to live for us. This is
especially true of provincials. Mme. de Bargeton, moreover, looked more
thoughtful and dignified than was necessary now, when no barriers stood
between her and happiness.

Gentil and Albertine waited upon
them, and while they were present Lucien could not complain. The
dinner, sent in from a neighboring restaurant, fell far below the
provincial average, both in quantity and quality; the essential
goodness of country fare was wanting, and in point of quantity the
portions were cut with so strict an eye to business that they savored
of short commons. In such small matters Paris does not show its best
side to travelers of moderate fortune. Lucien waited till the meal was
over. Some change had come over Louise, he thought, but he could not
explain it.

And a change had, in fact, taken place. Events had
occurred while he slept; for reflection is an event in our inner
history, and Mme. de Bargeton had been reflecting.

About two
o'clock that afternoon, Sixte du Chatelet made his appearance in the
Rue de l'Echelle and asked for Albertine. The sleeping damsel was
roused, and to her he expressed his wish to speak with her mistress.
Mme. de Bargeton had scarcely time to dress before he came back again.
The unaccountable apparition of M. du Chatelet roused the lady's
curiosity, for she had kept her journey a profound secret, as she
thought. At three o'clock the visitor was admitted.

"I have
risked a reprimand from headquarters to follow you," he said, as he
greeted her; "I foresaw coming events. But if I lose my post for it,
YOU, at any rate, shall not be lost."

"What do you mean?" exclaimed Mme. de Bargeton.

"I
can see plainly that you love Lucien," he continued, with an air of
tender resignation. "You must love indeed if _you_ can act thus
recklessly, and disregard the conventions which you know so well. Dear
adored Nais, can you really imagine that Mme. d'Espard's salon, or any
other salon in Paris, will not be closed to you as soon as it is known
that you have fled from Angouleme, as it were, with a young man,
especially after the duel between M. de Bargeton and M. de Chandour?
The fact that your husband has gone to the Escarbas looks like a
separation. Under such circumstances a gentleman fights first and
afterwards leaves his wife at liberty. By all means, give M. de
Rubempre your love and your countenance; do just as you please; but you
must not live in the same house. If anybody here in Paris knew that you
had traveled together, the whole world that you have a mind to see
would point the finger at you.

"And, Nais, do not make these
sacrifices for a young man whom you have as yet compared with no one
else; he, on his side, has been put to no proof; he may forsake you for
some Parisienne, better able, as he may fancy, to further his
ambitions. I mean no harm to the man you love, but you will permit me
to put your own interests before his, and to beg you to study him, to
be fully aware of the serious nature of this step that you are taking.
And, then, if you find all doors closed against you, and that none of
the women call upon you, make sure at least that you will feel no
regret for all that you have renounced for him. Be very certain first
that he for whom you will have given up so much will always be worthy
of your sacrifices and appreciate them.

"Just now," continued
Chatelet, "Mme. d'Espard is the more prudish and particular because she
herself is separated from her husband, nobody knows why. The
Navarreins, the Lenoncourts, the Blamont-Chauvrys, and the rest of the
relations have all rallied round her; the most strait-laced women are
seen at her house, and receive her with respect, and the Marquis
d'Espard has been put in the wrong. The first call that you pay will
make it clear to you that I am right; indeed, knowing Paris as I do, I
can tell you beforehand that you will no sooner enter the Marquise's
salon than you will be in despair lest she should find out that you are
staying at the Gaillard-Bois with an apothecary's son, though he may
wish to be called M. de Rubempre.

"You will have rivals here,
women far more astute and shrewd than Amelie; they will not fail to
discover who you are, where you are, where you come from, and all that
you are doing. You have counted upon your incognito, I see, but you are
one of those women for whom an incognito is out of the question. You
will meet Angouleme at every turn. There are the deputies from the
Charente coming up for the opening of the session; there is the
Commandant in Paris on leave. Why, the first man or woman from
Angouleme who happens to see you would cut your career short in a
strange fashion. You would simply be Lucien's mistress.

"If you
need me at any time, I am staying with the Receiver-General in the Rue
du Faubourg Saint-Honore, two steps away from Mme. d'Espard's. I am
sufficiently acquainted with the Marechale de Carigliano, Mme. de
Serizy, and the President of the Council to introduce you to those
houses; but you will meet so many people at Mme. d'Espard's, that you
are not likely to require me. So far from wishing to gain admittance to
this set or that, every one will be longing to make your acquaintance."

Chatelet
talked on; Mme. de Bargeton made no interruption. She was struck with
his perspicacity. The queen of Angouleme had, in fact, counted upon
preserving her incognito.

"You are right, my dear friend," she said at length; "but what am I to
do?"

"Allow
me to find suitable furnished lodgings for you," suggested Chatelet;
"that way of living is less expensive than an inn. You will have a home
of your own; and, if you will take my advice, you will sleep in your
new rooms this very night."

"But how did you know my address?" queried she.

"Your
traveling carriage is easily recognized; and, besides, I was following
you. At Sevres your postilion told mine that he had brought you here.
Will you permit me to act as your harbinger? I will write as soon as I
have found lodgings."

"Very well, do so," said she. And in those
seemingly insignificant words, all was said. The Baron du Chatelet had
spoken the language of worldly wisdom to a woman of the world. He had
made his appearance before her in faultless dress, a neat cab was
waiting for him at the door; and Mme. de Bargeton, standing by the
window thinking over the position, chanced to see the elderly dandy
drive away.

A few moments later Lucien appeared, half awake and
hastily dressed. He was handsome, it is true; but his clothes, his last
year's nankeen trousers, and his shabby tight jacket were ridiculous.
Put Antinous or the Apollo Belvedere himself into a water-carrier's
blouse, and how shall you recognize the godlike creature of the Greek
or Roman chisel? The eyes note and compare before the heart has time to
revise the swift involuntary judgment; and the contrast between Lucien
and Chatelet was so abrupt that it could not fail to strike Louise.

Towards
six o'clock that evening, when dinner was over, Mme. de Bargeton
beckoned Lucien to sit beside her on the shabby sofa, covered with a
flowered chintz--a yellow pattern on a red ground.

"Lucien
mine," she said, "don't you think that if we have both of us done a
foolish thing, suicidal for both our interests, it would only be common
sense to set matters right? We ought not to live together in Paris,
dear boy, and we must not allow anyone to suspect that we traveled
together. Your career depends so much upon my position that I ought to
do nothing to spoil it. So, to-night, I am going to remove into
lodgings near by. But you will stay on here, we can see each other
every day, and nobody can say a word against us."

And Louise
explained conventions to Lucien, who opened wide eyes. He had still to
learn that when a woman thinks better of her folly, she thinks better
of her love; but one thing he understood--he saw that he was no longer
the Lucien of Angouleme. Louise talked of herself, of _her_ interests,
_her_ reputation, and of the world; and, to veil her egoism, she tried
to make him believe that this was all on his account. He had no claim
upon Louise thus suddenly transformed into Mme. de Bargeton, and, more
serious still, he had no power over her. He could not keep back the
tears that filled his eyes.

"If I am your glory," cried the
poet, "you are yet more to me--you are my one hope, my whole future
rests with you. I thought that if you meant to make my successes yours,
you would surely make my adversity yours also, and here we are going to
part already."

"You are judging my conduct," said she; "you do not love me."

Lucien looked at her with such a dolorous expression, that in spite of
herself, she said:

"Darling,
I will stay if you like. We shall both be ruined, we shall have no one
to come to our aid. But when we are both equally wretched, and every
one shuts their door upon us both, when failure (for we must look all
possibilities in the face), when failure drives us back to the
Escarbas, then remember, love, that I foresaw the end, and that at the
first I proposed that we should make your way by conforming to
established rules."

"Louise," he cried, with his arms around
her, "you are wise; you frighten me! Remember that I am a child, that I
have given myself up entirely to your dear will. I myself should have
preferred to overcome obstacles and win my way among men by the power
that is in me; but if I can reach the goal sooner through your aid, I
shall be very glad to owe all my success to you. Forgive me! You mean
so much to me that I cannot help fearing all kinds of things; and, for
me, parting means that desertion is at hand, and desertion is death."

"But,
my dear boy, the world's demands are soon satisfied," returned she.
"You must sleep here; that is all. All day long you will be with me,
and no one can say a word."

A few kisses set Lucien's mind
completely at rest. An hour later Gentil brought in a note from
Chatelet. He told Mme. de Bargeton that he had found lodgings for her
in the Rue Nueve-de-Luxembourg. Mme. de Bargeton informed herself of
the exact place, and found that it was not very far from the Rue de
l'Echelle. "We shall be neighbors," she told Lucien.

Two hours
afterwards Louise stepped into the hired carriage sent by Chatelet for
the removal to the new rooms. The apartments were of the class that
upholsterers furnish and let to wealthy deputies and persons of
consideration on a short visit to Paris--showy and uncomfortable. It
was eleven o'clock when Lucien returned to his inn, having seen nothing
as yet of Paris except the part of the Rue Saint-Honore which lies
between the Rue Neuve-de-Luxembourg and the Rue de l'Echelle. He lay
down in his miserable little room, and could not help comparing it in
his own mind with Louise's sumptuous apartments.

Just as he came
away the Baron du Chatelet came in, gorgeously arrayed in evening
dress, fresh from the Minister for Foreign Affairs, to inquire whether
Mme. de Bargeton was satisfied with all that he had done on her behalf.
Nais was uneasy. The splendor was alarming to her mind. Provincial life
had reacted upon her; she was painfully conscientious over her
accounts, and economical to a degree that is looked upon as miserly in
Paris. She had brought with her twenty thousand francs in the shape of
a draft on the Receiver-General, considering that the sum would more
than cover the expenses of four years in Paris; she was afraid already
lest she should not have enough, and should run into debt; and now
Chatelet told her that her rooms would only cost six hundred francs per
month.

"A mere trifle," added he, seeing that Nais was startled.
"For five hundred francs a month you can have a carriage from a livery
stable; fifty louis in all. You need only think of your dress. A woman
moving in good society could not well do less; and if you mean to
obtain a Receiver-General's appointment for M. de Bargeton, or a post
in the Household, you ought not to look poverty-stricken. Here, in
Paris, they only give to the rich. It is most fortunate that you
brought Gentil to go out with you, and Albertine for your own woman,
for servants are enough to ruin you here. But with your introductions
you will seldom be home to a meal."

Mme. de Bargeton and the
Baron de Chatelet chatted about Paris. Chatelet gave her all the news
of the day, the myriad nothings that you are bound to know, under
penalty of being a nobody. Before very long the Baron also gave advice
as to shopping, recommending Herbault for toques and Juliette for hats
and bonnets; he added the address of a fashionable dressmaker to
supersede Victorine. In short, he made the lady see the necessity of
rubbing off Angouleme. Then he took his leave after a final flash of
happy inspiration.

"I expect I shall have a box at one of the
theatres to-morrow," he remarked carelessly; "I will call for you and
M. de Rubempre, for you must allow me to do the honors of Paris."

"There
is more generosity in his character than I thought," said Mme. de
Bargeton to herself when Lucien was included in the invitation.

In
the month of June ministers are often puzzled to know what to do with
boxes at the theatre; ministerialist deputies and their constituents
are busy in their vineyards or harvest fields, and their more exacting
acquaintances are in the country or traveling about; so it comes to
pass that the best seats are filled at this season with heterogeneous
theatre-goers, never seen at any other time of year, and the house is
apt to look as if it were tapestried with very shabby material.
Chatelet had thought already that this was his opportunity of giving
Nais the amusements which provincials crave most eagerly, and that with
very little expense.

The next morning, the very first morning in
Paris, Lucien went to the Rue Nueve-de-Luxembourg and found that Louise
had gone out. She had gone to make some indispensable purchases, to
take counsel of the mighty and illustrious authorities in the matter of
the feminine toilette, pointed out to her by Chatelet, for she had
written to tell the Marquise d'Espard of her arrival. Mme. de Bargeton
possessed the self-confidence born of a long habit of rule, but she was
exceedingly afraid of appearing to be provincial. She had tact enough
to know how greatly the relations of women among themselves depend upon
first impressions; and though she felt that she was equal to taking her
place at once in such a distinguished set as Mme. de d'Espard's, she
felt also that she stood in need of goodwill at her first entrance into
society, and was resolved, in the first place, that she would leave
nothing undone to secure success. So she felt boundlessly thankful to
Chatelet for pointing out these ways of putting herself in harmony with
the fashionable world.

A singular chance so ordered it that the
Marquise was delighted to find an opportunity of being useful to a
connection of her husband's family. The Marquis d'Espard had withdrawn
himself without apparent reason from society, and ceased to take any
active interest in affairs, political or domestic. His wife, thus left
mistress of her actions, felt the need of the support of public
opinion, and was glad to take the Marquis' place and give her
countenance to one of her husband's relations. She meant to be
ostentatiously gracious, so as to put her husband more evidently in the
wrong; and that very day she wrote, "Mme. de Bargeton _nee_
Negrepelisse" a charming billet, one of the prettily worded
compositions of which time alone can discover the emptiness.

"She was delighted that circumstances had brought a relative, of whom
she had heard, whose acquaintance she had desired to make, into closer
connection with her family. Friendships in Paris were not so solid but
that she longed to find one more to love on earth; and if this might
not be, there would only be one more illusion to bury with the rest.
She put herself entirely at her cousin's disposal. She would have
called upon her if indisposition had not kept her to the house, and she
felt that she lay already under obligations to the cousin who had
thought of her."

Lucien, meanwhile, taking his first ramble
along the Rue de la Paix and through the Boulevards, like all
newcomers, was much more interested in the things that he saw than in
the people he met. The general effect of Paris is wholly engrossing at
first. The wealth in the shop windows, the high houses, the streams of
traffic, the contrast everywhere between the last extremes of luxury
and want struck him more than anything else. In his astonishment at the
crowds of strange faces, the man of imaginative temper felt as if he
himself had shrunk, as it were, immensely. A man of any consequence in
his native place, where he cannot go out but he meets with some
recognition of his importance at every step, does not readily accustom
himself to the sudden and total extinction of his consequence. You are
somebody in your own country, in Paris you are nobody. The transition
between the first state and the last should be made gradually, for the
too abrupt fall is something like annihilation. Paris could not fail to
be an appalling wilderness for a young poet, who looked for an echo for
all his sentiments, a confidant for all his thoughts, a soul to share
his least sensations.

Lucien had not gone in search of his
luggage and his best blue coat; and painfully conscious of the
shabbiness, to say no worse, of his clothes, he went to Mme. de
Bargeton, feeling that she must have returned. He found the Baron du
Chatelet, who carried them both off to dinner at the _Rocher de
Cancale_. Lucien's head was dizzy with the whirl of Paris, the Baron
was in the carriage, he could say nothing to Louise, but he squeezed
her hand, and she gave a warm response to the mute confidence.

After
dinner Chatelet took his guests to the Vaudeville. Lucien, in his
heart, was not over well pleased to see Chatelet again, and cursed the
chance that had brought the Baron to Paris. The Baron said that
ambition had brought him to town; he had hopes of an appointment as
secretary-general to a government department, and meant to take a seat
in the Council of State as Master of Requests. He had come to Paris to
ask for fulfilment of the promises that had been given him, for a man
of his stamp could not be expected to remain a comptroller all his
life; he would rather be nothing at all, and offer himself for election
as deputy, or re-enter diplomacy. Chatelet grew visibly taller; Lucien
dimly began to recognize in this elderly beau the superiority of the
man of the world who knows Paris; and, most of all, he felt ashamed to
owe his evening's amusement to his rival. And while the poet looked ill
at ease and awkward Her Royal Highness' ex-secretary was quite in his
element. He smiled at his rival's hesitations, at his astonishment, at
the questions he put, at the little mistakes which the latter
ignorantly made, much as an old salt laughs at an apprentice who has
not found his sea legs; but Lucien's pleasure at seeing a play for the
first time in Paris outweighed the annoyance of these small
humiliations.

That evening marked an epoch in Lucien's career;
he put away a good many of his ideas as to provincial life in the
course of it. His horizon widened; society assumed different
proportions. There were fair Parisiennes in fresh and elegant toilettes
all about him; Mme. de Bargeton's costume, tolerably ambitious though
it was, looked dowdy by comparison; the material, like the fashion and
the color, was out of date. That way of arranging her hair, so
bewitching in Angouleme, looked frightfully ugly here among the
daintily devised coiffures which he saw in every direction.

"Will she always look like that?" said he to himself, ignorant that the
morning had been spent in preparing a transformation.

In
the provinces comparison and choice are out of the question; when a
face has grown familiar it comes to possess a certain beauty that is
taken for granted. But transport the pretty woman of the provinces to
Paris, and no one takes the slightest notice of her; her prettiness is
of the comparative degree illustrated by the saying that among the
blind the one-eyed are kings. Lucien's eyes were now busy comparing
Mme. de Bargeton with other women, just as she herself had contrasted
him with Chatelet on the previous day. And Mme. de Bargeton, on her
part, permitted herself some strange reflections upon her lover. The
poet cut a poor figure notwithstanding his singular beauty. The sleeves
of his jacket were too short; with his ill-cut country gloves and a
waistcoat too scanty for him, he looked prodigiously ridiculous,
compared with the young men in the balcony--"positively pitiable,"
thought Mme. de Bargeton. Chatelet, interested in her without
presumption, taking care of her in a manner that revealed a profound
passion; Chatelet, elegant, and as much at home as an actor treading
the familiar boards of his theatre, in two days had recovered all the
ground lost in the past six months.

Ordinary people will not
admit that our sentiments towards each other can totally change in a
moment, and yet certain it is, that two lovers not seldom fly apart
even more quickly than they drew together. In Mme. de Bargeton and in
Lucien a process of disenchantment was at work; Paris was the cause.
Life had widened out before the poet's eyes, as society came to wear a
new aspect for Louise. Nothing but an accident now was needed to sever
finally the bond that united them; nor was that blow, so terrible for
Lucien, very long delayed.

Mme. de Bargeton set Lucien down at his inn, and drove home with
Chatelet, to the intense vexation of the luckless lover.

"What will they say about me?" he wondered, as he climbed the stairs to
his dismal room.

"That poor fellow is uncommonly dull," said Chatelet, with a smile,
when the door was closed.

"That
is the way with those who have a world of thoughts in their heart and
brain. Men who have so much in them to give out in great works long
dreamed of, profess a certain contempt for conversation, a commerce in
which the intellect spends itself in small change," returned the
haughty Negrepelisse. She still had courage to defend Lucien, but less
for Lucien's sake than for her own.

"I grant it you willingly,"
replied the Baron, "but we live with human beings and not with books.
There, dear Nais! I see how it is, there is nothing between you yet,
and I am delighted that it is so. If you decide to bring an interest of
a kind hitherto lacking into your life, let it not be this so-called
genius, I implore you. How if you have made a mistake? Suppose that in
a few days' time, when you have compared him with men whom you will
meet, men of real ability, men who have distinguished themselves in
good earnest; suppose that you should discover, dear and fair siren,
that it is no lyre-bearer that you have borne into port on your
dazzling shoulders, but a little ape, with no manners and no capacity;
a presumptuous fool who may be a wit in L'Houmeau, but turns out a very
ordinary specimen of a young man in Paris? And, after all, volumes of
verse come out every week here, the worst of them better than all M.
Chardon's poetry put together. For pity's sake, wait and compare!
To-morrow, Friday, is Opera night," he continued as the carriage turned
into the Rue Nueve-de-Luxembourg; "Mme. d'Espard has the box of the
First Gentlemen of the Chamber, and will take you, no doubt. I shall go
to Mme. de Serizy's box to behold you in your glory. They are giving
_Les Danaides_."

"Good-bye," said she.

Next morning Mme.
de Bargeton tried to arrange a suitable toilette in which to call on
her cousin, Mme. d'Espard. The weather was rather chilly. Looking
through the dowdy wardrobe from Angouleme, she found nothing better
than a certain green velvet gown, trimmed fantastically enough. Lucien,
for his part, felt that he must go at once for his celebrated blue best
coat; he felt aghast at the thought of his tight jacket, and determined
to be well dressed, lest he should meet the Marquise d'Espard or
receive a sudden summons to her house. He must have his luggage at
once, so he took a cab, and in two hours' time spent three or four
francs, matter for much subsequent reflection on the scale of the cost
of living in Paris. Having dressed himself in his best, such as it was,
he went to the Rue Nueve-de-Luxembourg, and on the doorstep encountered
Gentil in company with a gorgeously be-feathered chasseur.

"I
was just going round to you, sir, madame gave me a line for you," said
Gentil, ignorant of Parisian forms of respect, and accustomed to homely
provincial ways. The chasseur took the poet for a servant.

Lucien
tore open the note, and learned that Mme. de Bargeton had gone to spend
the day with the Marquise d'Espard. She was going to the Opera in the
evening, but she told Lucien to be there to meet her. Her cousin
permitted her to give him a seat in her box. The Marquise d'Espard was
delighted to procure the young poet that pleasure.

"Then she
loves me! my fears were all nonsense!" said Lucien to himself. "She is
going to present me to her cousin this very evening."

He jumped
for joy. He would spend the day that separated him from the happy
evening as joyously as might be. He dashed out in the direction of the
Tuileries, dreaming of walking there until it was time to dine at
Very's. And now, behold Lucien frisking and skipping, light of foot
because light of heart, on his way to the Terrasse des Feuillants to
take a look at the people of quality on promenade there. Pretty women
walk arm-in-arm with men of fashion, their adorers, couples greet each
other with a glance as they pass; how different it is from the terrace
at Beaulieu! How far finer the birds on this perch than the Angouleme
species! It is as if you beheld all the colors that glow in the plumage
of the feathered tribes of India and America, instead of the sober
European families.

Those were two wretched hours that Lucien
spent in the Garden of the Tuileries. A violent revulsion swept through
him, and he sat in judgment upon himself.

In the first place,
not a single one of these gilded youths wore a swallow-tail coat. The
few exceptions, one or two poor wretches, a clerk here and there, an
annuitant from the Marais, could be ruled out on the score of age; and
hard upon the discovery of a distinction between morning and evening
dress, the poet's quick sensibility and keen eyes saw likewise that his
shabby old clothes were not fit to be seen; the defects in his coat
branded that garment as ridiculous; the cut was old-fashioned, the
color was the wrong shade of blue, the collar outrageously ungainly,
the coat tails, by dint of long wear, overlapped each other, the
buttons were reddened, and there were fatal white lines along the
seams. Then his waistcoat was too short, and so grotesquely provincial,
that he hastily buttoned his coat over it; and, finally, no man of any
pretension to fashion wore nankeen trousers. Well-dressed men wore
charming fancy materials or immaculate white, and every one had straps
to his trousers, while the shrunken hems of Lucien's nether garments
manifested a violent antipathy for the heels of boots which they wedded
with obvious reluctance. Lucien wore a white cravat with embroidered
ends; his sister had seen that M. du Hautoy and M. de Chandour wore
such things, and hastened to make similar ones for her brother. Here,
no one appeared to wear white cravats of a morning except a few grave
seniors, elderly capitalists, and austere public functionaries, until,
in the street on the other side of the railings, Lucien noticed a
grocer's boy walking along the Rue de Rivoli with a basket on his head;
him the man of Angouleme detected in the act of sporting a cravat, with
both ends adorned by the handiwork of some adored shop-girl. The sight
was a stab to Lucien's breast; penetrating straight to that organ as
yet undefined, the seat of our sensibility, the region whither, since
sentiment has had any existence, the sons of men carry their hands in
any excess of joy or anguish. Do not accuse this chronicle of
puerility. The rich, to be sure, never having experienced sufferings of
this kind, may think them incredibly petty and small; but the agonies
of less fortunate mortals are as well worth our attention as crises and
vicissitudes in the lives of the mighty and privileged ones of earth.
Is not the pain equally great for either? Suffering exalts all things.
And, after all, suppose that we change the terms and for a suit of
clothes, more or less fine, put instead a ribbon, or a star, or a
title; have not brilliant careers been tormented by reason of such
apparent trifles as these? Add, moreover, that for those people who
must seem to have that which they have not, the question of clothes is
of enormous importance, and not unfrequently the appearance of
possession is the shortest road to possession at a later day.

A
cold sweat broke out over Lucien as he bethought himself that to-night
he must make his first appearance before the Marquise in this
dress--the Marquise d'Espard, relative of a First Gentleman of the
Bedchamber, a woman whose house was frequented by the most illustrious
among illustrious men in every field.

"I look like an
apothecary's son, a regular shop-drudge," he raged inwardly, watching
the youth of the Faubourg Saint-Germain pass under his eyes; graceful,
spruce, fashionably dressed, with a certain uniformity of air, a
sameness due to a fineness of contour, and a certain dignity of
carriage and expression; though, at the same time, each one differed
from the rest in the setting by which he had chosen to bring his
personal characteristics into prominence. Each one made the most of his
personal advantages. Young men in Paris understand the art of
presenting themselves quite as well as women. Lucien had inherited from
his mother the invaluable physical distinction of race, but the metal
was still in the ore, and not set free by the craftsman's hand.

His
hair was badly cut. Instead of holding himself upright with an elastic
corset, he felt that he was cooped up inside a hideous shirt-collar; he
hung his dejected head without resistance on the part of a limp cravat.
What woman could guess that a handsome foot was hidden by the clumsy
boots which he had brought from Angouleme? What young man could envy
him his graceful figure, disguised by the shapeless blue sack which
hitherto he had mistakenly believed to be a coat? What bewitching studs
he saw on those dazzling white shirt fronts, his own looked dingy by
comparison; and how marvelously all these elegant persons were gloved,
his own gloves were only fit for a policeman! Yonder was a youth toying
with a cane exquisitely mounted; there, another with dainty gold studs
in his wristbands. Yet another was twisting a charming riding-whip
while he talked with a woman; there were specks of mud on the ample
folds of his white trousers, he wore clanking spurs and a tight-fitting
jacket, evidently he was about to mount one of the two horses held by a
hop-o'-my-thumb of a tiger. A young man who went past drew a watch no
thicker than a five-franc piece from his pocket, and looked at it with
the air of a person who is either too early or too late for an
appointment.

Lucien, seeing these petty trifles, hitherto
unimagined, became aware of a whole world of indispensable
superfluities, and shuddered to think of the enormous capital needed by
a professional pretty fellow! The more he admired these gay and
careless beings, the more conscious he grew of his own outlandishness;
he knew that he looked like a man who has no idea of the direction of
the streets, who stands close to the Palais Royal and cannot find it,
and asks his way to the Louvre of a passer-by, who tells him, "Here you
are." Lucien saw a great gulf fixed between him and this new world, and
asked himself how he might cross over, for he meant to be one of these
delicate, slim youths of Paris, these young patricians who bowed before
women divinely dressed and divinely fair. For one kiss from one of
these, Lucien was ready to be cut in pieces like Count Philip of
Konigsmark. Louise's face rose up somewhere in the shadowy background
of memory--compared with these queens, she looked like an old woman. He
saw women whose names will appear in the history of the nineteenth
century, women no less famous than the queens of past times for their
wit, their beauty, or their lovers; one who passed was the heroine
Mlle. des Touches, so well known as Camille Maupin, the great woman of
letters, great by her intellect, great no less by her beauty. He
overheard the name pronounced by those who went by.

"Ah!" he thought to himself, "she is Poetry."

What
was Mme. de Bargeton in comparison with this angel in all the glory of
youth, and hope, and promise of the future, with that sweet smile of
hers, and the great dark eyes with all heaven in them, and the glowing
light of the sun? She was laughing and chatting with Mme. Firmiani, one
of the most charming women in Paris. A voice indeed cried, "Intellect
is the lever by which to move the world," but another voice cried no
less loudly that money was the fulcrum.

He would not stay any
longer on the scene of his collapse and defeat, and went towards the
Palais Royal. He did not know the topography of his quarter yet, and
was obliged to ask his way. Then he went to Very's and ordered dinner
by way of an initiation into the pleasures of Paris, and a solace for
his discouragement. A bottle of Bordeaux, oysters from Ostend, a dish
of fish, a partridge, a dish of macaroni and dessert,--this was the _ne
plus ultra_ of his desire. He enjoyed this little debauch, studying the
while how to give the Marquise d'Espard proof of his wit, and redeem
the shabbiness of his grotesque accoutrements by the display of
intellectual riches. The total of the bill drew him down from these
dreams, and left him the poorer by fifty of the francs which were to
have gone such a long way in Paris. He could have lived in Angouleme
for a month on the price of that dinner. Wherefore he closed the door
of the palace with awe, thinking as he did so that he should never set
foot in it again.

"Eve was right," he said to himself, as he
went back under the stone arcading for some more money. "There is a
difference between Paris prices and prices in L'Houmeau."

He gazed in at the tailors' windows on the way, and thought of the
costumes in the Garden of the Tuileries.

"No," he exclaimed, "I will _not_ appear before Mme. d'Espard dressed
out as I am."

He
fled to his inn, fleet as a stag, rushed up to his room, took out a
hundred crowns, and went down again to the Palais Royal, where his
future elegance lay scattered over half a score of shops. The first
tailor whose door he entered tried as many coats upon him as he would
consent to put on, and persuaded his customer that all were in the very
latest fashion. Lucien came out the owner of a green coat, a pair of
white trousers, and a "fancy waistcoat," for which outfit he gave two
hundred francs. Ere long he found a very elegant pair of ready-made
shoes that fitted his foot; and, finally, when he had made all
necessary purchases, he ordered the tradespeople to send them to his
address, and inquired for a hairdresser. At seven o'clock that evening
he called a cab and drove away to the Opera, curled like a Saint John
of a Procession Day, elegantly waistcoated and gloved, but feeling a
little awkward in this kind of sheath in which he found himself for the
first time.

In obedience to Mme. de Bargeton's instructions, he
asked for the box reserved for the First Gentleman of the Bedchamber.
The man at the box office looked at him, and beholding Lucien in all
the grandeur assumed for the occasion, in which he looked like a best
man at a wedding, asked Lucien for his order.

"I have no order."

"Then you cannot go in," said the man at the box office drily.

"But I belong to Mme. d'Espard's party."

"It
is not our business to know that," said the man, who could not help
exchanging a barely perceptible smile with his colleague.

A
carriage stopped under the peristyle as he spoke. A chasseur, in a
livery which Lucien did not recognize, let down the step, and two women
in evening dress came out of the brougham. Lucien had no mind to lay
himself open to an insolent order to get out of the way from the
official. He stepped aside to let the two ladies pass.

"Why, that lady is the Marquise d'Espard, whom you say you know, sir,"
said the man ironically.

Lucien
was so much the more confounded because Mme. de Bargeton did not seem
to recognize him in his new plumage; but when he stepped up to her, she
smiled at him and said:

"This has fallen out wonderfully--come!"

The
functionaries at the box office grew serious again as Lucien followed
Mme. de Bargeton. On their way up the great staircase the lady
introduced M. de Rubempre to her cousin. The box belonging to the First
Gentleman of the Bedchamber is situated in one of the angles at the
back of the house, so that its occupants see and are seen all over the
theatre. Lucien took his seat on a chair behind Mme. de Bargeton,
thankful to be in the shadow.

"M. de Rubempre," said the
Marquise with flattering graciousness, "this is your first visit to the
Opera, is it not? You must have a view of the house; take this seat,
sit in front of the box; we give you permission."

Lucien obeyed as the first act came to an end.

"You have made good use of your time," Louise said in his ear, in her
first surprise at the change in his appearance.

Louise
was still the same. The near presence of the Marquise d'Espard, a
Parisian Mme. de Bargeton, was so damaging to her; the brilliancy of
the Parisienne brought out all the defects in her country cousin so
clearly by contrast; that Lucien, looking out over the fashionable
audience in the superb building, and then at the great lady, was twice
enlightened, and saw poor Anais de Negrepelisse as she really was, as
Parisians saw her--a tall, lean, withered woman, with a pimpled face
and faded complexion; angular, stiff, affected in her manner; pompous
and provincial in her speech; and, and above all these things, dowdily
dressed. As a matter of fact, the creases in an old dress from Paris
still bear witness to good taste, you can tell what the gown was meant
for; but an old dress made in the country is inexplicable, it is a
thing to provoke laughter. There was neither charm nor freshness about
the dress or its wearer; the velvet, like the complexion had seen wear.
Lucien felt ashamed to have fallen in love with this cuttle-fish bone,
and vowed that he would profit by Louise's next fit of virtue to leave
her for good. Having an excellent view of the house, he could see the
opera-glasses pointed at the aristocratic box par excellence. The
best-dressed women must certainly be scrutinizing Mme. de Bargeton, for
they smiled and talked among themselves.

If Mme. d'Espard knew
the object of their sarcasms from those feminine smiles and gestures,
she was perfectly insensible to them. In the first place, anybody must
see that her companion was a poor relation from the country, an
affliction with which any Parisian family may be visited. And, in the
second, when her cousin had spoken to her of her dress with manifest
misgivings, she had reassured Anais, seeing that, when once properly
dressed, her relative would very easily acquire the tone of Parisian
society. If Mme. de Bargeton needed polish, on the other hand she
possessed the native haughtiness of good birth, and that indescribable
something which may be called "pedigree." So, on Monday her turn would
come. And, moreover, the Marquise knew that as soon as people learned
that the stranger was her cousin, they would suspend their banter and
look twice before they condemned her.

Lucien did not foresee the
change in Louise's appearance shortly to be worked by a scarf about her
throat, a pretty dress, an elegant coiffure, and Mme. d'Espard's
advice. As they came up the staircase even now, the Marquise told her
cousin not to hold her handkerchief unfolded in her hand. Good or bad
taste turns upon hundreds of such almost imperceptible shades, which a
quick-witted woman discerns at once, while others will never grasp
them. Mme. de Bargeton, plentifully apt, was more than clever enough to
discover her shortcomings. Mme. d'Espard, sure that her pupil would do
her credit, did not decline to form her. In short, the compact between
the two women had been confirmed by self-interest on either side.

Mme.
de Bargeton, enthralled, dazzled, and fascinated by her cousin's
manner, wit, and acquaintances, had suddenly declared herself a votary
of the idol of the day. She had discerned the signs of the occult power
exerted by the ambitious great lady, and told herself that she could
gain her end as the satellite of this star, so she had been outspoken
in her admiration. The Marquise was not insensible to the artlessly
admitted conquest. She took an interest in her cousin, seeing that she
was weak and poor; she was, besides, not indisposed to take a pupil
with whom to found a school, and asked nothing better than to have a
sort of lady-in-waiting in Mme. de Bargeton, a dependent who would sing
her praises, a treasure even more scarce among Parisian women than a
staunch and loyal critic among the literary tribe. The flutter of
curiosity in the house was too marked to be ignored, however, and Mme.
d'Espard politely endeavored to turn her cousin's mind from the truth.

"If
any one comes to our box," she said, "perhaps we may discover the cause
to which we owe the honor of the interest that these ladies are
taking----"

"I have a strong suspicion that it is my old velvet
gown and Angoumoisin air which Parisian ladies find amusing," Mme. de
Bargeton answered, laughing.

"No, it is not you; it is something
that I cannot explain," she added, turning to the poet, and, as she
looked at him for the first time, it seemed to strike her that he was
singularly dressed.

"There is M. du Chatelet," exclaimed Lucien
at that moment, and he pointed a finger towards Mme. de Serizy's box,
which the renovated beau had just entered.

Mme. de Bargeton bit
her lips with chagrin as she saw that gesture, and saw besides the
Marquise's ill-suppressed smile of contemptuous astonishment. "Where
does the young man come from?" her look said, and Louise felt humbled
through her love, one of the sharpest of all pangs for a Frenchwoman, a
mortification for which she cannot forgive her lover.

In these
circles where trifles are of such importance, a gesture or a word at
the outset is enough to ruin a newcomer. It is the principal merit of
fine manners and the highest breeding that they produce the effect of a
harmonious whole, in which every element is so blended that nothing is
startling or obtrusive. Even those who break the laws of this science,
either through ignorance or carried away by some impulse, must
comprehend that it is with social intercourse as with music, a single
discordant note is a complete negation of the art itself, for the
harmony exists only when all its conditions are observed down to the
least particular.

"Who is that gentleman?" asked Mme. d'Espard,
looking towards Chatelet. "And have you made Mme. de Serizy's
acquaintance already?"

"Oh! is that the famous Mme. de Serizy who has had so many adventures
and yet goes everywhere?"

"An
unheard-of-thing, my dear, explicable but unexplained. The most
formidable men are her friends, and why? Nobody dares to fathom the
mystery. Then is this person the lion of Angouleme?"

"Well, M.
le Baron du Chatelet has been a good deal talked about," answered Mme.
de Bargeton, moved by vanity to give her adorer the title which she
herself had called in question. "He was M. de Montriveau's traveling
companion."

"Ah!" said the Marquise d'Espard, "I never hear that
name without thinking of the Duchesse de Langeais, poor thing. She
vanished like a falling star.--That is M. de Rastignac with Mme. de
Nucingen," she continued, indicating another box; "she is the wife of a
contractor, a banker, a city man, a broker on a large scale; he forced
his way into society with his money, and they say that he is not very
scrupulous as to his methods of making it. He is at endless pains to
establish his credit as a staunch upholder of the Bourbons, and has
tried already to gain admittance into my set. When his wife took Mme.
de Langeais' box, she thought that she could take her charm, her wit,
and her success as well. It is the old fable of the jay in the
peacock's feathers!"

"How do M. and Mme. de Rastignac manage to
keep their son in Paris, when, as we know, their income is under a
thousand crowns?" asked Lucien, in his astonishment at Rastignac's
elegant and expensive dress.

"It is easy to see that you come
from Angouleme," said Mme. d'Espard, ironically enough, as she
continued to gaze through her opera-glass.

Her remark was lost
upon Lucien; the all-absorbing spectacle of the boxes prevented him
from thinking of anything else. He guessed that he himself was an
object of no small curiosity. Louise, on the other hand, was
exceedingly mortified by the evident slight esteem in which the
Marquise held Lucien's beauty.

"He cannot be so handsome as I
thought him," she said to herself; and between "not so handsome" and
"not so clever as I thought him" there was but one step.

The
curtain fell. Chatelet was now paying a visit to the Duchesse de
Carigliano in an adjourning box; Mme. de Bargeton acknowledged his bow
by a slight inclination of the head. Nothing escapes a woman of the
world; Chatelet's air of distinction was not lost upon Mme. d'Espard.
Just at that moment four personages, four Parisian celebrities, came
into the box, one after another.

The most striking feature of
the first comer, M. de Marsay, famous for the passions which he had
inspired, was his girlish beauty; but its softness and effeminacy were
counteracted by the expression of his eyes, unflinching, steady,
untamed, and hard as a tiger's. He was loved and he was feared. Lucien
was no less handsome; but Lucien's expression was so gentle, his blue
eyes so limpid, that he scarcely seemed to possess the strength and the
power which attract women so strongly. Nothing, moreover, so far had
brought out the poet's merits; while de Marsay, with his flow of
spirits, his confidence in his power to please, and appropriate style
of dress, eclipsed every rival by his presence. Judge, therefore, the
kind of figure that Lucien, stiff, starched, unbending in clothes as
new and unfamiliar as his surroundings, was likely to cut in de
Marsay's vicinity. De Marsay with his wit and charm of manner was
privileged to be insolent. From Mme. d'Espard's reception of this
personage his importance was at once evident to Mme. de Bargeton.

The
second comer was a Vandenesse, the cause of the scandal in which Lady
Dudley was concerned. Felix de Vandenesse, amiable, intellectual, and
modest, had none of the characteristics on which de Marsay prided
himself, and owed his success to diametrically opposed qualities. He
had been warmly recommended to Mme. d'Espard by her cousin Mme. de
Mortsauf.

The third was General de Montriveau, the author of the Duchesse de
Langeais' ruin.

The
fourth, M. de Canalis, one of the most famous poets of the day, and as
yet a newly risen celebrity, was prouder of his birth than of his
genius, and dangled in Mme. d'Espard's train by way of concealing his
love for the Duchesse de Chaulieu. In spite of his graces and the
affectation that spoiled them, it was easy to discern the vast, lurking
ambitions that plunged him at a later day into the storms of political
life. A face that might be called insignificantly pretty and caressing
manners thinly disguised the man's deeply-rooted egoism and habit of
continually calculating the chances of a career which at that time
looked problematical enough; though his choice of Mme. de Chaulieu (a
woman past forty) made interest for him at Court, and brought him the
applause of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the gibes of the Liberal
party, who dubbed him "the poet of the sacristy."

Mme. de
Bargeton, with these remarkable figures before her, no longer wondered
at the slight esteem in which the Marquise held Lucien's good looks.
And when conversation began, when intellects so keen, so subtle, were
revealed in two-edged words with more meaning and depth in them than
Anais de Bargeton heard in a month of talk at Angouleme; and, most of
all, when Canalis uttered a sonorous phrase, summing up a materialistic
epoch, and gilding it with poetry--then Anais felt all the truth of
Chatelet's dictum of the previous evening. Lucien was nothing to her
now. Every one cruelly ignored the unlucky stranger; he was so much
like a foreigner listening to an unknown language, that the Marquise
d'Espard took pity upon him. She turned to Canalis.

"Permit me
to introduce M. de Rubempre," she said. "You rank too high in the world
of letters not to welcome a _debutant_. M. de Rubempre is from
Angouleme, and will need your influence, no doubt, with the powers that
bring genius to light. So far, he has no enemies to help him to success
by their attacks upon him. Is there enough originality in the idea of
obtaining for him by friendship all that hatred has done for you to
tempt you to make the experiment?"

The four newcomers all looked
at Lucien while the Marquise was speaking. De Marsay, only a couple of
paces away, put up an eyeglass and looked from Lucien to Mme. de
Bargeton, and then again at Lucien, coupling them with some mocking
thought, cruelly mortifying to both. He scrutinized them as if they had
been a pair of strange animals, and then he smiled. The smile was like
a stab to the distinguished provincial. Felix de Vandenesse assumed a
charitable air. Montriveau looked Lucien through and through.

"Madame,"
M. de Canalis answered with a bow, "I will obey you, in spite of the
selfish instinct which prompts us to show a rival no favor; but you
have accustomed us to miracles."

"Very well, do me the pleasure
of dining with me on Monday with M. de Rubempre, and you can talk of
matters literary at your ease. I will try to enlist some of the tyrants
of the world of letters and the great people who protect them, the
author of _Ourika_, and one or two young poets with sound views."

"Mme.
la Marquise," said de Marsay, "if you give your support to this
gentleman for his intellect, I will support him for his good looks. I
will give him advice which will put him in a fair way to be the
luckiest dandy in Paris. After that, he may be a poet--if he has a
mind."

Mme. de Bargeton thanked her cousin by a grateful glance.

"I
did not know that you were jealous of intellect," Montriveau said,
turning to de Marsay; "good fortune is the death of a poet."

"Is
that why your lordship is thinking of marriage?" inquired the dandy,
addressing Canalis, and watching Mme. d'Espard to see if the words went
home.

Canalis shrugged his shoulders, and Mme. d'Espard, Mme. de
Chaulieu's niece, began to laugh. Lucien in his new clothes felt as if
he were an Egyptian statue in its narrow sheath; he was ashamed that he
had nothing to say for himself all this while. At length he turned to
the Marquise.

"After all your kindness, madame, I am pledged to make no failures," he
said in those soft tones of his.

Chatelet
came in as he spoke; he had seen Montriveau, and by hook or crook
snatched at the chance of a good introduction to the Marquise d'Espard
through one of the kings of Paris. He bowed to Mme. de Bargeton, and
begged Mme. d'Espard to pardon him for the liberty he took in invading
her box; he had been separated so long from his traveling companion!
Montriveau and Chatelet met for the first time since they parted in the
desert.

"To part in the desert, and meet again in the opera-house!" said Lucien.

"Quite a theatrical meeting!" said Canalis.

Montriveau
introduced the Baron du Chatelet to the Marquise, and the Marquise
received Her Royal Highness' ex-secretary the more graciously because
she had seen that he had been very well received in three boxes
already. Mme. de Serizy knew none but unexceptionable people, and
moreover he was Montriveau's traveling companion. So potent was this
last credential, that Mme. de Bargeton saw from the manner of the group
that they accepted Chatelet as one of themselves without demur.
Chatelet's sultan's airs in Angouleme were suddenly explained.

At
length the Baron saw Lucien, and favored him with a cool, disparaging
little nod, indicative to men of the world of the recipient's inferior
station. A sardonic expression accompanied the greeting, "How does _he_
come here?" he seemed to say. This was not lost on those who saw it;
for de Marsay leaned towards Montriveau, and said in tones audible to
Chatelet:

"Do ask him who the queer-looking young fellow is that looks like a
dummy at a tailor's shop-door."

Chatelet
spoke a few words in his traveling companion's ear, and while
apparently renewing his acquaintance, no doubt cut his rival to pieces.

If
Lucien was surprised at the apt wit and the subtlety with which these
gentlemen formulated their replies, he felt bewildered with epigram and
repartee, and, most of all, by their offhand way of talking and their
ease of manner. The material luxury of Paris had alarmed him that
morning; at night he saw the same lavish expenditure of intellect. By
what mysterious means, he asked himself, did these people make such
piquant reflections on the spur of the moment, those repartees which he
could only have made after much pondering? And not only were they at
ease in their speech, they were at ease in their dress, nothing looked
new, nothing looked old, nothing about them was conspicuous, everything
attracted the eyes. The fine gentleman of to-day was the same
yesterday, and would be the same to-morrow. Lucien guessed that he
himself looked as if he were dressed for the first time in his life.

"My
dear fellow," said de Marsay, addressing Felix de Vandenesse, "that
young Rastignac is soaring away like a paper-kite. Look at him in the
Marquise de Listomere's box; he is making progress, he is putting up
his eyeglass at us! He knows this gentleman, no doubt," added the
dandy, speaking to Lucien, and looking elsewhere.

"He can
scarcely fail to have heard the name of a great man of whom we are
proud," said Mme. de Bargeton. "Quite lately his sister was present
when M. de Rubempre read us some very fine poetry."

Felix de
Vandenesse and de Marsay took leave of the Marquise d'Espard, and went
off to Mme. de Listomere, Vandenesse's sister. The second act began,
and the three were left to themselves again. The curious women learned
how Mme. de Bargeton came to be there from some of the party, while the
others announced the arrival of a poet, and made fun of his costume.
Canalis went back to the Duchesse de Chaulieu, and no more was seen of
him.

Lucien was glad when the rising of the curtain produced a
diversion. All Mme. de Bargeton's misgivings with regard to Lucien were
increased by the marked attention which the Marquise d'Espard had shown
to Chatelet; her manner towards the Baron was very different from the
patronizing affability with which she treated Lucien. Mme. de
Listomere's box was full during the second act, and, to all appearance,
the talk turned upon Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien. Young Rastignac
evidently was entertaining the party; he had raised the laughter that
needs fresh fuel every day in Paris, the laughter that seizes upon a
topic and exhausts it, and leaves it stale and threadbare in a moment.
Mme. d'Espard grew uneasy. She knew that an ill-natured speech is not
long in coming to the ears of those whom it will wound, and waited till
the end of the act.

After a revulsion of feeling such as had
taken place in Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien, strange things come to pass
in a brief space of time, and any revolution within us is controlled by
laws that work with great swiftness. Chatelet's sage and politic words
as to Lucien, spoken on the way home from the Vaudeville, were fresh in
Louise's memory. Every phrase was a prophecy, it seemed as if Lucien
had set himself to fulfil the predictions one by one. When Lucien and
Mme. de Bargeton had parted with their illusions concerning each other,
the luckless youth, with a destiny not unlike Rousseau's, went so far
in his predecessor's footsteps that he was captivated by the great lady
and smitten with Mme. d'Espard at first sight. Young men and men who
remember their young emotions can see that this was only what might
have been looked for. Mme. d'Espard with her dainty ways, her delicate
enunciation, and the refined tones of her voice; the fragile woman so
envied, of such high place and high degree, appeared before the poet as
Mme. de Bargeton had appeared to him in Angouleme. His fickle nature
prompted him to desire influence in that lofty sphere at once, and the
surest way to secure such influence was to possess the woman who
exerted it, and then everything would be his. He had succeeded at
Angouleme, why should he not succeed in Paris?

Involuntarily,
and despite the novel counter fascination of the stage, his eyes turned
to the Celimene in her splendor; he glanced furtively at her every
moment; the longer he looked, the more he desired to look at her. Mme.
de Bargeton caught the gleam in Lucien's eyes, and saw that he found
the Marquise more interesting than the opera. If Lucien had forsaken
her for the fifty daughters of Danaus, she could have borne his
desertion with equanimity; but another glance--bolder, more ardent and
unmistakable than any before--revealed the state of Lucien's feelings.
She grew jealous, but not so much for the future as for the past.

"He never gave me such a look," she thought. "Dear me! Chatelet was
right!"

Then
she saw that she had made a mistake; and when a woman once begins to
repent of her weaknesses, she sponges out the whole past. Every one of
Lucien's glances roused her indignation, but to all outward appearance
she was calm. De Marsay came back in the interval, bringing M. de
Listomere with him; and that serious person and the young coxcomb soon
informed the Marquise that the wedding guest in his holiday suit, whom
she had the bad luck to have in her box, had as much right to the
appellation of Rubempre as a Jew to a baptismal name. Lucien's father
was an apothecary named Chardon. M. de Rastignac, who knew all about
Angouleme, had set several boxes laughing already at the mummy whom the
Marquise styled her cousin, and at the Marquise's forethought in having
an apothecary at hand to sustain an artificial life with drugs. In
short, de Marsay brought a selection from the thousand-and-one jokes
made by Parisians on the spur of the moment, and no sooner uttered than
forgotten. Chatelet was at the back of it all, and the real author of
this Punic faith.

Mme. d'Espard turned to Mme. de Bargeton, put
up her fan, and said, "My dear, tell me if your protege's name is
really M. de Rubempre?"

"He has assumed his mother's name," said Anais, uneasily.

"But who was his father?"

"His father's name was Chardon."

"And what was this Chardon?"

"A druggist."

"My
dear friend, I felt quite sure that all Paris could not be laughing at
any one whom I took up. I do not care to stay here when wags come in in
high glee because there is an apothecary's son in my box. If you will
follow my advice, we will leave it, and at once."

Mme.
d'Espard's expression was insolent enough; Lucien was at a loss to
account for her change of countenance. He thought that his waistcoat
was in bad taste, which was true; and that his coat looked like a
caricature of the fashion, which was likewise true. He discerned, in
bitterness of soul, that he must put himself in the hands of an expert
tailor, and vowed that he would go the very next morning to the most
celebrated artist in Paris. On Monday he would hold his own with the
men in the Marquise's house.

Yet, lost in thought though he was,
he saw the third act to an end, and, with his eyes fixed on the
gorgeous scene upon the stage, dreamed out his dream of Mme. d'Espard.
He was in despair over her sudden coldness; it gave a strange check to
the ardent reasoning through which he advanced upon this new love,
undismayed by the immense difficulties in the way, difficulties which
he saw and resolved to conquer. He roused himself from these deep
musings to look once more at his new idol, turned his head, and saw
that he was alone; he had heard a faint rustling sound, the door
closed--Madame d'Espard had taken her cousin with her. Lucien was
surprised to the last degree by the sudden desertion; he did not think
long about it, however, simply because it was inexplicable.

When
the carriage was rolling along the Rue de Richelieu on the way to the
Faubourg Saint-Honore, the Marquise spoke to her cousin in a tone of
suppressed irritation.

"My dear child, what are you thinking
about? Pray wait till an apothecary's son has made a name for himself
before you trouble yourself about him. The Duchesse de Chaulieu does
not acknowledge Canalis even now, and he is famous and a man of good
family. This young fellow is neither your son nor your lover, I
suppose?" added the haughty dame, with a keen, inquisitive glance at
her cousin.

"How fortunate for me that I kept the little scapegrace at a distance!"
thought Madame de Bargeton.

"Very
well," continued the Marquise, taking the expression in her cousin's
eyes for an answer, "drop him, I beg of you. Taking an illustrious name
in that way!--Why, it is a piece of impudence that will meet with its
desserts in society. It is his mother's name, I dare say; but just
remember, dear, that the King alone can confer, by a special ordinance,
the title of de Rubempre on the son of a daughter of the house. If she
made a _mesalliance_, the favor would be enormous, only to be granted
to vast wealth, or conspicuous services, or very powerful influence.
The young man looks like a shopman in his Sunday suit; evidently he is
neither wealthy nor noble; he has a fine head, but he seems to me to be
very silly; he has no idea what to do, and has nothing to say for
himself; in fact, he has no breeding. How came you to take him up?"

Mme.
de Bargeton renounced Lucien as Lucien himself had renounced her; a
ghastly fear lest her cousin should learn the manner of her journey
shot through her mind.

"I
shall be ill," the Marquise said quickly; "you can tell him so, and I
shall leave orders that he is not to be admitted under either name."

During
the interval Lucien noticed that every one was walking up and down the
lobby. He would do the same. In the first place, not one of Mme.
d'Espard's visitors recognized him nor paid any attention to him, their
conduct seemed nothing less than extraordinary to the provincial poet;
and, secondly, Chatelet, on whom he tried to hang, watched him out of
the corner of his eye and fought shy of him. Lucien walked to and fro,
watching the eddying crowd of men, till he felt convinced that his
costume was absurd, and he went back to his box, ensconced himself in a
corner, and stayed there till the end. At times he thought of nothing
but the magnificent spectacle of the ballet in the great Inferno scene
in the fifth act; sometimes the sight of the house absorbed him,
sometimes his own thoughts; he had seen society in Paris, and the sight
had stirred him to the depths.

"So this is my kingdom," he said to himself; "this is the world that I
must conquer."

As
he walked home through the streets he thought over all that had been
said by Mme. d'Espard's courtiers; memory reproducing with strange
faithfulness their demeanor, their gestures, their manner of coming and
going.

Next day, towards noon, Lucien betook himself to Staub,
the great tailor of that day. Partly by dint of entreaties, and partly
by virtue of cash, Lucien succeeded in obtaining a promise that his
clothes should be ready in time for the great day. Staub went so far as
to give his word that a perfectly elegant coat, a waistcoat, and a pair
of trousers should be forthcoming. Lucien then ordered linen and
pocket-handkerchiefs, a little outfit, in short, of a linen-draper, and
a celebrated bootmaker measured him for shoes and boots. He bought a
neat walking cane at Verdier's; he went to Mme. Irlande for gloves and
shirt studs; in short, he did his best to reach the climax of dandyism.
When he had satisfied all his fancies, he went to the Rue
Neuve-de-Luxembourg, and found that Louise had gone out.

"She was dining with Mme. la Marquise d'Espard," her maid said, "and
would not be back till late."

Lucien
dined for two francs at a restaurant in the Palais Royal, and went to
bed early. The next day was Sunday. He went to Louise's lodging at
eleven o'clock. Louise had not yet risen. At two o'clock he returned
once more.

"Madame cannot see anybody yet," reported Albertine, "but she gave me a
line for you."

"Cannot see anybody yet?" repeated Lucien. "But I am not anybody----"

"I
do not know," Albertine answered very impertinently; and Lucien, less
surprised by Albertine's answer than by a note from Mme. de Bargeton,
took the billet, and read the following discouraging lines:--

"Mme. d'Espard is not well; she will not be able to see you on Monday.
I am not feeling very well myself, but I am about to dress and go to
keep her company. I am in despair over this little disappointment; but
your talents reassure me, you will make your way without charlatanism."

"And no signature!" Lucien said to himself. He found himself in the
Tuileries before he knew whither he was walking.

With
the gift of second-sight which accompanies genius, he began to suspect
that the chilly note was but a warning of the catastrophe to come. Lost
in thought, he walked on and on, gazing at the monuments in the Place
Louis Quinze.

It was a sunny day; a stream of fine carriages
went past him on the way to the Champs Elysees. Following the direction
of the crowd of strollers, he saw the three or four thousand carriages
that turn the Champs Elysees into an improvised Longchamp on Sunday
afternoons in summer. The splendid horses, the toilettes, and liveries
bewildered him; he went further and further, until he reached the Arc
de Triomphe, then unfinished. What were his feelings when, as he
returned, he saw Mme. de Bargeton and Mme. d'Espard coming towards him
in a wonderfully appointed caleche, with a chasseur behind it in waving
plumes and that gold-embroidered green uniform which he knew only too
well. There was a block somewhere in the row, and the carriages waited.
Lucien beheld Louise transformed beyond recognition. All the colors of
her toilette had been carefully subordinated to her complexion; her
dress was delicious, her hair gracefully and becomingly arranged, her
hat, in exquisite taste, was remarkable even beside Mme. d'Espard, that
leader of fashion.

There is something in the art of wearing a
hat that escapes definition. Tilted too far to the back of the head, it
imparts a bold expression to the face; bring it too far forward, it
gives you a sinister look; tipped to one side, it has a jaunty air; a
well-dressed woman wears her hat exactly as she means to wear it, and
exactly at the right angle. Mme. de Bargeton had solved this curious
problem at sight. A dainty girdle outlined her slender waist. She had
adopted her cousin's gestures and tricks of manner; and now, as she sat
by Mme. d'Espard's side, she played with a tiny scent bottle that
dangled by a slender gold chain from one of her fingers, displayed a
little well-gloved hand without seeming to do so. She had modeled
herself on Mme. d'Espard without mimicking her; the Marquise had found
a cousin worthy of her, and seemed to be proud of her pupil.

The
men and women on the footways all gazed at the splendid carriage, with
the bearings of the d'Espards and Blamont-Chauvrys upon the panels.
Lucien was amazed at the number of greetings received by the cousins;
he did not know that the "all Paris," which consists in some score of
salons, was well aware already of the relationship between the ladies.
A little group of young men on horseback accompanied the carriage in
the Bois; Lucien could recognize de Marsay and Rastignac among them,
and could see from their gestures that the pair of coxcombs were
complimenting Mme. de Bargeton upon her transformation. Mme. d'Espard
was radiant with health and grace. So her indisposition was simply a
pretext for ridding herself of him, for there had been no mention of
another day!

The wrathful poet went towards the caleche; he
walked slowly, waited till he came in full sight of the two ladies, and
made them a bow. Mme. de Bargeton would not see him; but the Marquise
put up her eyeglass, and deliberately cut him. He had been disowned by
the sovereign lords of Angouleme, but to be disowned by society in
Paris was another thing; the booby-squires by doing their utmost to
mortify Lucien admitted his power and acknowledged him as a man; for
Mme. d'Espard he had positively no existence. This was a sentence, it
was a refusal of justice. Poor poet! a deadly cold seized on him when
he saw de Marsay eying him through his glass; and when the Parisian
lion let that optical instrument fall, it dropped in so singular a
fashion that Lucien thought of the knife-blade of the guillotine.

The
caleche went by. Rage and a craving for vengeance took possession of
his slighted soul. If Mme. de Bargeton had been in his power, he could
have cut her throat at that moment; he was a Fouquier-Tinville gloating
over the pleasure of sending Mme. d'Espard to the scaffold. If only he
could have put de Marsay to the torture with refinements of savage
cruelty! Canalis went by on horseback, bowing to the prettiest women,
his dress elegant, as became the most dainty of poets.

"Great
heavens!" exclaimed Lucien. "Money, money at all costs! money is the
one power before which the world bends the knee." ("No!" cried
conscience, "not money, but glory; and glory means work! Work! that was
what David said.") "Great heavens! what am I doing here? But I will
triumph. I will drive along this avenue in a caleche with a chasseur
behind me! I will possess a Marquise d'Espard." And flinging out the
wrathful words, he went to Hurbain's to dine for two francs.

Next
morning, at nine o'clock, he went to the Rue Neuve-de-Luxembourg to
upbraid Louise for her barbarity. But Mme. de Bargeton was not at home
to him, and not only so, but the porter would not allow him to go up to
her rooms; so he stayed outside in the street, watching the house till
noon. At twelve o'clock Chatelet came out, looked at Lucien out of the
corner of his eye, and avoided him.

Stung to the quick, Lucien
hurried after his rival; and Chatelet, finding himself closely pursued,
turned and bowed, evidently intending to shake him off by this courtesy.

"Spare
me just a moment for pity's sake, sir," said Lucien; "I want just a
word or two with you. You have shown me friendship, I now ask the most
trifling service of that friendship. You have just come from Mme. de
Bargeton; how have I fallen into disgrace with her and Mme.
d'Espard?--please explain."

"M. Chardon, do you know why the ladies left you at the Opera that
evening?" asked Chatelet, with treacherous good-nature.

"No," said the poor poet.

"Well,
it was M. de Rastignac who spoke against you from the beginning. They
asked him about you, and the young dandy simply said that your name was
Chardon, and not de Rubempre; that your mother was a monthly nurse;
that your father, when he was alive, was an apothecary in L'Houmeau, a
suburb of Angouleme; and that your sister, a charming girl, gets up
shirts to admiration, and is just about to be married to a local
printer named Sechard. Such is the world! You no sooner show yourself
than it pulls you to pieces.

"M. de Marsay came to Mme. d'Espard
to laugh at you with her; so the two ladies, thinking that your
presence put them in a false position, went out at once. Do not attempt
to go to either house. If Mme. de Bargeton continued to receive your
visits, her cousin would have nothing to do with her. You have genius;
try to avenge yourself. The world looks down upon you; look down in
your turn upon the world. Take refuge in some garret, write your
masterpieces, seize on power of any kind, and you will see the world at
your feet. Then you can give back the bruises which you have received,
and in the very place where they were given. Mme. de Bargeton will be
the more distant now because she has been friendly. That is the way
with women. But the question now for you is not how to win back Anais'
friendship, but how to avoid making an enemy of her. I will tell you of
a way. She has written letters to you; send all her letters back to
her, she will be sensible that you are acting like a gentleman; and at
a later time, if you should need her, she will not be hostile. For my
own part, I have so high an opinion of your future, that I have taken
your part everywhere; and if I can do anything here for you, you will
always find me ready to be of use."

The elderly beau seemed to
have grown young again in the atmosphere of Paris. He bowed with frigid
politeness; but Lucien, woe-begone, haggard, and undone, forgot to
return the salutation. He went back to his inn, and there found the
great Staub himself, come in person, not so much to try his customer's
clothes as to make inquiries of the landlady with regard to that
customer's financial status. The report had been satisfactory. Lucien
had traveled post; Mme. de Bargeton brought him back from Vaudeville
last Thursday in her carriage. Staub addressed Lucien as "Monsieur le
Comte," and called his customer's attention to the artistic skill with
which he had brought a charming figure into relief.

"A young man
in such a costume has only to walk in the Tuileries," he said, "and he
will marry an English heiress within a fortnight."

Lucien
brightened a little under the influences of the German tailor's joke,
the perfect fit of his new clothes, the fine cloth, and the sight of a
graceful figure which met his eyes in the looking-glass. Vaguely he
told himself that Paris was the capital of chance, and for the moment
he believed in chance. Had he not a volume of poems and a magnificent
romance entitled _The Archer of Charles IX._ in manuscript? He had hope
for the future. Staub promised the overcoat and the rest of the clothes
the next day.

The next day the bootmaker, linen-draper, and
tailor all returned armed each with his bill, which Lucien, still under
the charm of provincial habits, paid forthwith, not knowing how
otherwise to rid himself of them. After he had paid, there remained but
three hundred and sixty francs out of the two thousand which he had
brought with him from Angouleme, and he had been but one week in Paris!
Nevertheless, he dressed and went to take a stroll in the Terrassee des
Feuillants. He had his day of triumph. He looked so handsome and so
graceful, he was so well dressed, that women looked at him; two or
three were so much struck with his beauty, that they turned their heads
to look again. Lucien studied the gait and carriage of the young men on
the Terrasse, and took a lesson in fine manners while he meditated on
his three hundred and sixty francs.

That evening, alone in his
chamber, an idea occurred to him which threw a light on the problem of
his existence at the Gaillard-Bois, where he lived on the plainest
fare, thinking to economize in this way. He asked for his account, as
if he meant to leave, and discovered that he was indebted to his
landlord to the extent of a hundred francs. The next morning was spent
in running around the Latin Quarter, recommended for its cheapness by
David. For a long while he looked about till, finally, in the Rue de
Cluny, close to the Sorbonne, he discovered a place where he could have
a furnished room for such a price as he could afford to pay. He settled
with his hostess of the Gaillard-Bois, and took up his quarters in the
Rue de Cluny that same day. His removal only cost him the cab fare.

When
he had taken possession of his poor room, he made a packet of Mme. de
Bargeton's letters, laid them on the table, and sat down to write to
her; but before he wrote he fell to thinking over that fatal week. He
did not tell himself that he had been the first to be faithless; that
for a sudden fancy he had been ready to leave his Louise without
knowing what would become of her in Paris. He saw none of his own
shortcomings, but he saw his present position, and blamed Mme. de
Bargeton for it. She was to have lighted his way; instead she had
ruined him. He grew indignant, he grew proud, he worked himself into a
paroxysm of rage, and set himself to compose the following epistle:--

"What would you think, madame, of a woman who should take a fancy to
some poor and timid child full of the noble superstitions which the
grown man calls 'illusions;' and using all the charms of woman's
coquetry, all her most delicate ingenuity, should feign a mother's love
to lead that child astray? Her fondest promises, the card-castles which
raised his wonder, cost her nothing; she leads him on, tightens her
hold upon him, sometimes coaxing, sometimes scolding him for his want
of confidence, till the child leaves his home and follows her blindly
to the shores of a vast sea. Smiling, she lures him into a frail skiff,
and sends him forth alone and helpless to face the storm. Standing safe
on the rock, she laughs and wishes him luck. You are that woman; I am
that child.

"The child has a keepsake in his hands, something
which might betray the wrongs done by your beneficence, your kindness
in deserting him. You might have to blush if you saw him struggling for
life, and chanced to recollect that once you clasped him to your
breast. When you read these words the keepsake will be in your own safe
keeping; you are free to forget everything.

"Once you pointed
out fair hopes to me in the skies, I awake to find reality in the
squalid poverty of Paris. While you pass, and others bow before you, on
your brilliant path in the great world, I, I whom you deserted on the
threshold, shall be shivering in the wretched garret to which you
consigned me. Yet some pang may perhaps trouble your mind amid
festivals and pleasures; you may think sometimes of the child whom you
thrust into the depths. If so, madame, think of him without remorse.
Out of the depths of his misery the child offers you the one thing left
to him--his forgiveness in a last look. Yes, madame, thanks to you, I
have nothing left. Nothing! was not the world created from nothing?
Genius should follow the Divine example; I begin with God-like
forgiveness, but as yet I know not whether I possess the God-like
power. You need only tremble lest I should go astray; for you would be
answerable for my sins. Alas! I pity you, for you will have no part in
the future towards which I go, with work as my guide."

After
penning this rhetorical effusion, full of the sombre dignity which an
artist of one-and-twenty is rather apt to overdo, Lucien's thoughts
went back to them at home. He saw the pretty rooms which David had
furnished for him, at the cost of part of his little store, and a
vision rose before him of quiet, simple pleasures in the past. Shadowy
figures came about him; he saw his mother and Eve and David, and heard
their sobs over his leave-taking, and at that he began to cry himself,
for he felt very lonely in Paris, and friendless and forlorn.

Two or three days later he wrote to his sister:--

"MY DEAR EVE,--When a sister shares the life of a brother who devotes
himself to art, it is her sad privilege to take more sorrow than joy
into her life; and I am beginning to fear that I shall be a great
trouble to you. Have I not abused your goodness already? have not all
of you sacrificed yourselves to me? It is the memory of the past, so
full of family happiness, that helps me to bear up in my present
loneliness. Now that I have tasted the first beginnings of poverty and
the treachery of the world of Paris, how my thoughts have flown to you,
swift as an eagle back to its eyrie, so that I might be with true
affection again. Did you see sparks in the candle? Did a coal pop out
of the fire? Did you hear singing in your ears? And did mother say,
'Lucien is thinking of us,' and David answer, 'He is fighting his way
in the world?'

"My Eve, I am writing this letter for your eyes
only. I cannot tell any one else all that has happened to me, good and
bad, blushing for both, as I write, for good here is as rare as evil
ought to be. You shall have a great piece of news in a very few words.
Mme. de Bargeton was ashamed of me, disowned me, would not see me, and
gave me up nine days after we came to Paris. She saw me in the street
and looked another way; when, simply to follow her into the society to
which she meant to introduce me, I had spent seventeen hundred and
sixty francs out of the two thousand I brought from Angouleme, the
money so hardly scraped together. 'How did you spend it?' you will ask.
Paris is a strange bottomless gulf, my poor sister; you can dine here
for less than a franc, yet the simplest dinner at a fashionable
restaurant costs fifty francs; there are waistcoats and trousers to be
had for four francs and two francs each; but a fashionable tailor never
charges less than a hundred francs. You pay for everything; you pay a
halfpenny to cross the kennel in the street when it rains; you cannot
go the least little way in a cab for less than thirty-two sous.

"I have been staying in one of the best parts of Paris, but now I am
living at the Hotel de Cluny, in the Rue de Cluny, one of the poorest
and darkest slums, shut in between three churches and the old buildings
of the Sorbonne. I have a furnished room on the fourth floor; it is
very bare and very dirty, but, all the same, I pay fifteen francs a
month for it. For breakfast I spend a penny on a roll and a halfpenny
for milk, but I dine very decently for twenty-two sous at a restaurant
kept by a man named Flicoteaux in the Place de la Sorbonne itself. My
expenses every month will not exceed sixty francs, everything included,
until the winter begins --at least I hope not. So my two hundred and
forty francs ought to last me for the first four months. Between now
and then I shall have sold _The Archer of Charles IX._ and the
_Marguerites_ no doubt. Do not be in the least uneasy on my account. If
the present is cold and bare and poverty-stricken, the blue distant
future is rich and splendid; most great men have known the vicissitudes
which depress but cannot overwhelm me.

"Plautus, the great
comic Latin poet, was once a miller's lad. Machiavelli wrote _The
Prince_ at night, and by day was a common working-man like any one
else; and more than all, the great Cervantes, who lost an arm at the
battle of Lepanto, and helped to win that famous day, was called a
'base-born, handless dotard' by the scribblers of his day; there was an
interval of ten years between the appearance of the first part and the
second of his sublime _Don Quixote_ for lack of a publisher. Things are
not so bad as that nowadays. Mortifications and want only fall to the
lot of unknown writers; as soon as a man's name is known, he grows
rich, and I will be rich. And besides, I live within myself, I spend
half the day at the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, learning all that I
want to learn; I should not go far unless I knew more than I do. So at
this moment I am almost happy. In a few days I have fallen in with my
life very gladly. I begin the work that I love with daylight, my
subsistence is secure, I think a great deal, and I study. I do not see
that I am open to attack at any point, now that I have renounced a
world where my vanity might suffer at any moment. The great men of
every age are obliged to lead lives apart. What are they but birds in
the forest? They sing, nature falls under the spell of their song, and
no one should see them. That shall be my lot, always supposing that I
can carry out my ambitious plans.

"Mme. de Bargeton I do not
regret. A woman who could behave as she behaved does not deserve a
thought. Nor am I sorry that I left Angouleme. She did wisely when she
flung me into the sea of Paris to sink or swim. This is the place for
men of letters and thinkers and poets; here you cultivate glory, and I
know how fair the harvest is that we reap in these days. Nowhere else
can a writer find the living works of the great dead, the works of art
which quicken the imagination in the galleries and museums here;
nowhere else will you find great reference libraries always open in
which the intellect may find pasture. And lastly, here in Paris there
is a spirit which you breathe in the air; it infuses the least details,
every literary creation bears traces of its influence. You learn more
by talk in a cafe, or at a theatre, in one half hour, than you would
learn in ten years in the provinces. Here, in truth, wherever you go,
there is always something to see, something to learn, some comparison
to make. Extreme cheapness and excessive dearness--there is Paris for
you; there is honeycomb here for every bee, every nature finds its own
nourishment. So, though life is hard for me just now, I repent of
nothing. On the contrary, a fair future spreads out before me, and my
heart rejoices though it is saddened for the moment. Good-bye my dear
sister. Do not expect letters from me regularly; it is one of the
peculiarities of Paris that one really does not know how the time goes.
Life is so alarmingly rapid. I kiss the mother and you and David more
tenderly than ever.

"LUCIEN."

The name of Flicoteaux is
engraved on many memories. Few indeed were the students who lived in
the Latin Quarter during the last twelve years of the Restoration and
did not frequent that temple sacred to hunger and impecuniosity. There
a dinner of three courses, with a quarter bottle of wine or a bottle of
beer, could be had for eighteen sous; or for twenty-two sous the
quarter bottle becomes a bottle. Flicoteaux, that friend of youth,
would beyond a doubt have amassed a colossal fortune but for a line on
his bill of fare, a line which rival establishments are wont to print
in capital letters, thus--BREAD AT DISCRETION, which, being
interpreted, should read "indiscretion."

Flicoteaux has been
nursing-father to many an illustrious name. Verily, the heart of more
than one great man ought to wax warm with innumerable recollections of
inexpressible enjoyment at the sight of the small, square window panes
that look upon the Place de la Sorbonne, and the Rue
Neuve-de-Richelieu. Flicoteaux II. and Flicoteaux III. respected the
old exterior, maintaining the dingy hue and general air of a
respectable, old-established house, showing thereby the depth of their
contempt for the charlatanism of the shop-front, the kind of
advertisement which feasts the eyes at the expense of the stomach, to
which your modern restaurant almost always has recourse. Here you
beheld no piles of straw-stuffed game never destined to make the
acquaintance of the spit, no fantastical fish to justify the
mountebank's remark, "I saw a fine carp to-day; I expect to buy it this
day week." Instead of the prime vegetables more fittingly described by
the word primeval, artfully displayed in the window for the delectation
of the military man and his fellow country-woman the nursemaid, honest
Flicoteaux exhibited full salad-bowls adorned with many a rivet, or
pyramids of stewed prunes to rejoice the sight of the customer, and
assure him that the word "dessert," with which other handbills made too
free, was in this case no charter to hoodwink the public. Loaves of six
pounds' weight, cut in four quarters, made good the promise of "bread
at discretion." Such was the plenty of the establishment, that Moliere
would have celebrated it if it had been in existence in his day, so
comically appropriate is the name.

Flicoteaux still subsists; so
long as students are minded to live, Flicoteaux will make a living. You
feed there, neither more nor less; and you feed as you work, with
morose or cheerful industry, according to the circumstances and the
temperament.

At that time his well-known establishment consisted
of two dining-halls, at right angles to each other; long, narrow,
low-ceiled rooms, looking respectively on the Rue Neuve-de-Richelieu
and the Place de la Sorbonne. The furniture must have come originally
from the refectory of some abbey, for there was a monastic look about
the lengthy tables, where the serviettes of regular customers, each
thrust through a numbered ring of crystallized tin plate, were laid by
their places. Flicoteaux I. only changed the serviettes of a Sunday;
but Flicoteaux II. changed them twice a week, it is said, under
pressure of competition which threatened his dynasty.

Flicoteaux's
restaurant is no banqueting-hall, with its refinements and luxuries; it
is a workshop where suitable tools are provided, and everybody gets up
and goes as soon as he has finished. The coming and going within are
swift. There is no dawdling among the waiters; they are all busy; every
one of them is wanted.

The fare is not very varied. The potato
is a permanent institution; there might not be a single tuber left in
Ireland, and prevailing dearth elsewhere, but you would still find
potatoes at Flicoteaux's. Not once in thirty years shall you miss its
pale gold (the color beloved of Titian), sprinkled with chopped
verdure; the potato enjoys a privilege that women might envy; such as
you see it in 1814, so shall you find it in 1840. Mutton cutlets and
fillet of beef at Flicoteaux's represent black game and fillet of
sturgeon at Very's; they are not on the regular bill of fare, that is,
and must be ordered beforehand. Beef of the feminine gender there
prevails; the young of the bovine species appears in all kinds of
ingenious disguises. When the whiting and mackerel abound on our
shores, they are likewise seen in large numbers at Flicoteaux's; his
whole establishment, indeed, is directly affected by the caprices of
the season and the vicissitudes of French agriculture. By eating your
dinners at Flicoteaux's you learn a host of things of which the
wealthy, the idle, and folk indifferent to the phases of Nature have no
suspicion, and the student penned up in the Latin Quarter is kept
accurately informed of the state of the weather and good or bad
seasons. He knows when it is a good year for peas or French beans, and
the kind of salad stuff that is plentiful; when the Great Market is
glutted with cabbages, he is at once aware of the fact, and the failure
of the beetroot crop is brought home to his mind. A slander, old in
circulation in Lucien's time, connected the appearance of beef-steaks
with a mortality among horseflesh.

Few Parisian restaurants are
so well worth seeing. Every one at Flicoteaux's is young; you see
nothing but youth; and although earnest faces and grave, gloomy,
anxious faces are not lacking, you see hope and confidence and poverty
gaily endured. Dress, as a rule, is careless, and regular comers in
decent clothes are marked exceptions. Everybody knows at once that
something extraordinary is afoot: a mistress to visit, a theatre party,
or some excursion into higher spheres. Here, it is said, friendships
have been made among students who became famous men in after days, as
will be seen in the course of this narrative; but with the exception of
a few knots of young fellows from the same part of France who make a
group about the end of a table, the gravity of the diners is hardly
relaxed. Perhaps this gravity is due to the catholicity of the wine,
which checks good fellowship of any kind.

Flicoteaux's
frequenters may recollect certain sombre and mysterious figures
enveloped in the gloom of the chilliest penury; these beings would dine
there daily for a couple of years and then vanish, and the most
inquisitive regular comer could throw no light on the disappearance of
such goblins of Paris. Friendships struck up over Flicoteaux's dinners
were sealed in neighboring cafes in the flames of heady punch, or by
the generous warmth of a small cup of black coffee glorified by a dash
of something hotter and stronger.

Lucien, like all neophytes,
was modest and regular in his habits in those early days at the Hotel
de Cluny. After the first unlucky venture in fashionable life which
absorbed his capital, he threw himself into his work with the first
earnest enthusiasm, which is frittered away so soon over the
difficulties or in the by-paths of every life in Paris. The most
luxurious and the very poorest lives are equally beset with temptations
which nothing but the fierce energy of genius or the morose persistence
of ambition can overcome.

Lucien used to drop in at Flicoteaux's
about half-past four, having remarked the advantages of an early
arrival; the bill-of-fare was more varied, and there was still some
chance of obtaining the dish of your choice. Like all imaginative
persons, he had taken a fancy to a particular seat, and showed
discrimination in his selection. On the very first day he had noticed a
table near the counter, and from the faces of those who sat about it,
and chance snatches of their talk, he recognized brothers of the craft.
A sort of instinct, moreover, pointed out the table near the counter as
a spot whence he could parlay with the owners of the restaurant. In
time an acquaintance would grow up, he thought, and then in the day of
distress he could no doubt obtain the necessary credit. So he took his
place at a small square table close to the desk, intended probably for
casual comers, for the two clean serviettes were unadorned with rings.
Lucien's opposite neighbor was a thin, pallid youth, to all appearance
as poor as himself; his handsome face was somewhat worn, already it
told of hopes that had vanished, leaving lines upon his forehead and
barren furrows in his soul, where seeds had been sown that had come to
nothing. Lucien felt drawn to the stranger by these tokens; his
sympathies went out to him with irresistible fervor.

After a
week's exchange of small courtesies and remarks, the poet from
Angouleme found the first person with whom he could chat. The
stranger's name was Etienne Lousteau. Two years ago he had left his
native place, a town in Berri, just as Lucien had come from Angouleme.
His lively gestures, bright eyes, and occasionally curt speech revealed
a bitter apprenticeship to literature. Etienne had come from Sancerre
with his tragedy in his pocket, drawn to Paris by the same motives that
impelled Lucien--hope of fame and power and money.

Sometimes
Etienne Lousteau came for several days together; but in a little while
his visits became few and far between, and he would stay away for five
or six days in succession. Then he would come back, and Lucien would
hope to see his poet next day, only to find a stranger in his place.
When two young men meet daily, their talk harks back to their last
conversation; but these continual interruptions obliged Lucien to break
the ice afresh each time, and further checked an intimacy which made
little progress during the first few weeks. On inquiry of the damsel at
the counter, Lucien was told that his future friend was on the staff of
a small newspaper, and wrote reviews of books and dramatic criticism of
pieces played at the Ambigu-Comique, the Gaite, and the
Panorama-Dramatique. The young man became a personage all at once in
Lucien's eyes. Now, he thought, he would lead the conversation on
rather more personal topics, and make some effort to gain a friend so
likely to be useful to a beginner. The journalist stayed away for a
fortnight. Lucien did not know that Etienne only dined at Flicoteaux's
when he was hard up, and hence his gloomy air of disenchantment and the
chilly manner, which Lucien met with gracious smiles and amiable
remarks. But, after all, the project of a friendship called for mature
deliberation. This obscure journalist appeared to lead an expensive
life in which _petits verres_, cups of coffee, punch-bowls,
sight-seeing, and suppers played a part. In the early days of Lucien's
life in the Latin Quarter, he behaved like a poor child bewildered by
his first experience of Paris life; so that when he had made a study of
prices and weighed his purse, he lacked courage to make advances to
Etienne; he was afraid of beginning a fresh series of blunders of which
he was still repenting. And he was still under the yoke of provincial
creeds; his two guardian angels, Eve and David, rose up before him at
the least approach of an evil thought, putting him in mind of all the
hopes that were centered on him, of the happiness that he owed to the
old mother, of all the promises of his genius.

He spent his
mornings in studying history at the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve. His
very first researches made him aware of frightful errors in the memoirs
of _The Archer of Charles IX._ When the library closed, he went back to
his damp, chilly room to correct his work, cutting out whole chapters
and piecing it together anew. And after dining at Flicoteaux's, he went
down to the Passage du Commerce to see the newspapers at Blosse's
reading-room, as well as new books and magazines and poetry, so as to
keep himself informed of the movements of the day. And when, towards
midnight, he returned to his wretched lodgings, he had used neither
fuel nor candle-light. His reading in those days made such an enormous
change in his ideas, that he revised the volume of flower-sonnets, his
beloved _Marguerites_, working them over to such purpose, that scarce a
hundred lines of the original verses were allowed to stand.

So
in the beginning Lucien led the honest, innocent life of the country
lad who never leaves the Latin Quarter; devoting himself wholly to his
work, with thoughts of the future always before him; who finds
Flicoteaux's ordinary luxurious after the simple home-fare; and strolls
for recreation along the alleys of the Luxembourg, the blood surging
back to his heart as he gives timid side glances to the pretty women.
But this could not last. Lucien, with his poetic temperament and
boundless longings, could not withstand the temptations held out by the
play-bills.

The Theatre-Francais, the Vaudeville, the Varietes,
the Opera-Comique relieved him of some sixty francs, although he always
went to the pit. What student could deny himself the pleasure of seeing
Talma in one of his famous roles? Lucien was fascinated by the theatre,
that first love of all poetic temperaments; the actors and actresses
were awe-inspiring creatures; he did not so much as dream of the
possibility of crossing the footlights and meeting them on familiar
terms. The men and women who gave him so much pleasure were surely
marvelous beings, whom the newspapers treated with as much gravity as
matters of national interest. To be a dramatic author, to have a play
produced on the stage! What a dream was this to cherish! A dream which
a few bold spirits like Casimir Delavigne had actually realized. Thick
swarming thoughts like these, and moments of belief in himself,
followed by despair gave Lucien no rest, and kept him in the narrow way
of toil and frugality, in spite of the smothered grumblings of more
than one frenzied desire.

Carrying prudence to an extreme, he
made it a rule never to enter the precincts of the Palais Royal, that
place of perdition where he had spent fifty francs at Very's in a
single day, and nearly five hundred francs on his clothes; and when he
yielded to temptation, and saw Fleury, Talma, the two Baptistes, or
Michot, he went no further than the murky passage where theatre-goers
used to stand in a string from half-past five in the afternoon till the
hour when the doors opened, and belated comers were compelled to pay
ten sous for a place near the ticket-office. And after waiting for two
hours, the cry of "All tickets are sold!" rang not unfrequently in the
ears of disappointed students. When the play was over, Lucien went home
with downcast eyes, through streets lined with living attractions, and
perhaps fell in with one of those commonplace adventures which loom so
large in a young and timorous imagination.

One day Lucien
counted over his remaining stock of money, and took alarm at the
melting of his funds; a cold perspiration broke out upon him when he
thought that the time had come when he must find a publisher, and try
also to find work for which a publisher would pay him. The young
journalist, with whom he had made a one-sided friendship, never came
now to Flicoteaux's. Lucien was waiting for a chance--which failed to
present itself. In Paris there are no chances except for men with a
very wide circle of acquaintance; chances of success of every kind
increase with the number of your connections; and, therefore, in this
sense also the chances are in favor of the big battalions. Lucien had
sufficient provincial foresight still left, and had no mind to wait
until only a last few coins remained to him. He resolved to face the
publishers.

So one tolerably chilly September morning Lucien
went down the Rue de la Harpe, with his two manuscripts under his arm.
As he made his way to the Quai des Augustins, and went along, looking
into the booksellers' windows on one side and into the Seine on the
other, his good genius might have counseled him to pitch himself into
the water sooner than plunge into literature. After heart-searching
hesitations, after a profound scrutiny of the various countenances,
more or less encouraging, soft-hearted, churlish, cheerful, or
melancholy, to be seen through the window panes, or in the doorways of
the booksellers' establishments, he espied a house where the shopmen
were busy packing books at a great rate. Goods were being despatched.
The walls were plastered with bills:

The
placard, a new and original idea of the celebrated Ladvocat, was just
beginning to blossom out upon the walls. In no long space Paris was to
wear motley, thanks to the exertions of his imitators, and the Treasury
was to discover a new source of revenue.

Anxiety sent the blood
surging to Lucien's heart, as he who had been so great at Angouleme, so
insignificant of late in Paris, slipped past the other houses, summoned
up all his courage, and at last entered the shop thronged with
assistants, customers, and booksellers--"And authors too, perhaps!"
thought Lucien.

"I want to speak with M. Vidal or M. Porchon,"
he said, addressing a shopman. He had read the names on the
sign-board--VIDAL & PORCHON (it ran), _French and foreign
booksellers' agents_.

"Both gentlemen are engaged," said the man.

"I will wait."

Left
to himself, the poet scrutinized the packages, and amused himself for a
couple of hours by scanning the titles of books, looking into them, and
reading a page or two here and there. At last, as he stood leaning
against a window, he heard voices, and suspecting that the green
curtains hid either Vidal or Porchon, he listened to the conversation.

"Will you take five hundred copies of me? If you will, I will let you
have them at five francs, and give fourteen to the dozen."

"What does that bring them in at?"

"Sixteen sous less."

"Four francs four sous?" said Vidal or Porchon, whichever it was.

"Yes," said the vendor.

"Credit your account?" inquired the purchaser.

"Old humbug! you would settle with me in eighteen months' time, with
bills at a twelvemonth."

"No. Settled at once," returned Vidal or Porchon.

"Bills at nine months?" asked the publisher or author, who evidently
was selling his book.

"No, my dear fellow, twelve months," returned one of the firm of
booksellers' agents.

There was a pause.

"You are simply cutting my throat!" said the visitor.

"But
in a year's time shall we have placed a hundred copies of _Leonide_?"
said the other voice. "If books went off as fast as the publishers
would like, we should be millionaires, my good sir; but they don't,
they go as the public pleases. There is some one now bringing out an
edition of Scott's novels at eighteen sous per volume, three livres
twelve sous per copy, and you want me to give you more for your stale
remainders? No. If you mean me to push this novel of yours, you must
make it worth my while.--Vidal!"

A stout man, with a pen behind his ear, came down from his desk.

"How many copies of Ducange did you place last journey?" asked Porchon
of his partner.

"Two
hundred of _Le Petit Vieillard de Calais_, but to sell them I was
obliged to cry down two books which pay in less commission, and
uncommonly fine 'nightingales' they are now.

(A "nightingale,"
as Lucien afterwards learned, is a bookseller's name for books that
linger on hand, perched out of sight in the loneliest nooks in the
shop.)

"And besides," added Vidal, "Picard is bringing out some
novels, as you know. We have been promised twenty per cent on the
published price to make the thing a success."

"Yes." The stranger went out. After he had gone, Lucien heard Porchon
say to Vidal:

"We
have three hundred copies on order now. We will keep him waiting for
his settlement, sell the _Leonides_ for five francs net, settlement in
six months, and----"

"And that will be fifteen hundred francs into our pockets," said Vidal.

"Oh, I saw quite well that he was in a fix. He is giving Ducange four
thousand francs for two thousand copies."

Lucien cut Vidal short by appearing in the entrance of the den.

"I have the honor of wishing you a good day, gentlemen," he said,
addressing both partners. The booksellers nodded slightly.

"I
have a French historical romance after the style of Scott. It is called
_The Archer of Charles IX._; I propose to offer it to you----"

Porchon glanced at Lucien with lustreless eyes, and laid his pen down
on the desk. Vidal stared rudely at the author.

"We
are not publishing booksellers, sir; we are booksellers' agents," he
said. "When we bring out a book ourselves, we only deal in well-known
names; and we only take serious literature besides--history and
epitomes."

"But my book is very serious. It is an attempt to set
the struggle between Catholics and Calvinists in its true light; the
Catholics were supporters of absolute monarchy, and the Protestants for
a republic."

"M. Vidal!" shouted an assistant. Vidal fled.

"I
don't say, sir, that your book is not a masterpiece," replied Porchon,
with scanty civility, "but we only deal in books that are ready
printed. Go and see somebody that buys manuscripts. There is old
Doguereau in the Rue du Coq, near the Louvre, he is in the romance
line. If you had only spoken sooner, you might have seen Pollet, a
competitor of Doguereau and of the publisher in the Wooden Galleries."

"I have a volume of poetry----"

"M. Porchon!" somebody shouted.

"_Poetry_!"
Porchon exclaimed angrily. "For what do you take me?" he added,
laughing in Lucien's face. And he dived into the regions of the back
shop.

Lucien went back across the Pont Neuf absorbed in
reflection. From all that he understood of this mercantile dialect, it
appeared that books, like cotton nightcaps, were to be regarded as
articles of merchandise to be sold dear and bought cheap.

"I
have made a mistake," said Lucien to himself; but, all the same, this
rough-and-ready practical aspect of literature made an impression upon
him.

In the Rue du Coq he stopped in front of a modest-looking
shop, which he had passed before. He saw the inscription DOGUEREAU,
BOOKSELLER, painted above it in yellow letters on a green ground, and
remembered that he had seen the name at the foot of the title-page of
several novels at Blosse's reading-room. In he went, not without the
inward trepidation which a man of any imagination feels at the prospect
of a battle. Inside the shop he discovered an odd-looking old man, one
of the queer characters of the trade in the days of the Empire.

Doguereau
wore a black coat with vast square skirts, when fashion required
swallow-tail coats. His waistcoat was of some cheap material, a checked
pattern of many colors; a steel chain, with a copper key attached to
it, hung from his fob and dangled down over a roomy pair of black
nether garments. The booksellers' watch must have been the size of an
onion. Iron-gray ribbed stockings, and shoes with silver buckles
completed is costume. The old man's head was bare, and ornamented with
a fringe of grizzled locks, quite poetically scanty. "Old Doguereau,"
as Porchon styled him, was dressed half like a professor of
belles-lettres as to his trousers and shoes, half like a tradesman with
respect to the variegated waistcoat, the stockings, and the watch; and
the same odd mixture appeared in the man himself. He united the
magisterial, dogmatic air, and the hollow countenance of the professor
of rhetoric with the sharp eyes, suspicious mouth, and vague uneasiness
of the bookseller.

"M. Doguereau?" asked Lucien.

"That is my name, sir."

"You are very young," remarked the bookseller.

"My age, sir, has nothing to do with the matter."

"True,"
and the old bookseller took up the manuscript. "Ah, begad! _The Archer
of Charles IX._, a good title. Let us see now, young man, just tell me
your subject in a word or two."

"It is a historical work, sir,
in the style of Scott. The character of the struggle between the
Protestants and Catholics is depicted as a struggle between two opposed
systems of government, in which the throne is seriously endangered. I
have taken the Catholic side."

"Eh! but you have ideas, young
man. Very well, I will read your book, I promise you. I would rather
have had something more in Mrs. Radcliffe's style; but if you are
industrious, if you have some notion of style, conceptions, ideas, and
the art of telling a story, I don't ask better than to be of use to
you. What do we want but good manuscripts?"

"When can I come back?"

"I
am going into the country this evening; I shall be back again the day
after to-morrow. I shall have read your manuscript by that time; and if
it suits me, we might come to terms that very day."

Seeing his acquaintance so easy, Lucien was inspired with the unlucky
idea of bringing the _Marguerites_ upon the scene.

"I have a volume of poetry as well, sir----" he began.

"Oh!
you are a poet! Then I don't want your romance," and the old man handed
back the manuscript. "The rhyming fellows come to grief when they try
their hands at prose. In prose you can't use words that mean nothing;
you absolutely must say something."

"But Sir Walter Scott, sir, wrote poetry as well as----"

"That
is true," said Doguereau, relenting. He guessed that the young fellow
before him was poor, and kept the manuscript. "Where do you live? I
will come and see you."

Lucien, all unsuspicious of the idea at
the back of the old man's head, gave his address; he did not see that
he had to do with a bookseller of the old school, a survival of the
eighteenth century, when booksellers tried to keep Voltaires and
Montesquieus starving in garrets under lock and key.

"The Latin Quarter. I am coming back that very way," said Doguereau,
when he had read the address.

"Good
man!" thought Lucien, as he took his leave. "So I have met with a
friend to young authors, a man of taste who knows something. That is
the kind of man for me! It is just as I said to David--talent soon
makes its way in Paris."

Lucien went home again happy and light
of heart; he dreamed of glory. He gave not another thought to the
ominous words which fell on his ear as he stood by the counter in Vidal
and Porchon's shop; he beheld himself the richer by twelve hundred
francs at least. Twelve hundred francs! It meant a year in Paris, a
whole year of preparation for the work that he meant to do. What plans
he built on that hope! What sweet dreams, what visions of a life
established on a basis of work! Mentally he found new quarters, and
settled himself in them; it would not have taken much to set him making
a purchase or two. He could only stave off impatience by constant
reading at Blosse's.

Two days later old Doguereau come to the
lodgings of his budding Sir Walter Scott. He was struck with the pains
which Lucien had taken with the style of this his first work, delighted
with the strong contrasts of character sanctioned by the epoch, and
surprised at the spirited imagination which a young writer always
displays in the scheming of a first plot--he had not been spoiled,
thought old Daddy Doguereau. He had made up his mind to give a thousand
francs for _The Archer of Charles IX._; he would buy the copyright out
and out, and bind Lucien by an engagement for several books, but when
he came to look at the house, the old fox thought better of it.

"A
young fellow that lives here has none but simple tastes," said he to
himself; "he is fond of study, fond of work; I need not give more than
eight hundred francs."

"Fourth floor," answered the landlady,
when he asked for M. Lucien de Rubempre. The old bookseller, peering
up, saw nothing but the sky above the fourth floor.

"This young
fellow," thought he, "is a good-looking lad; one might go so far as to
say that he is very handsome. If he were to make too much money, he
would only fall into dissipated ways, and then he would not work. In
the interests of us both, I shall only offer six hundred francs, in
coin though, not paper."

He climbed the stairs and gave three
raps at the door. Lucien came to open it. The room was forlorn in its
bareness. A bowl of milk and a penny roll stood on the table. The
destitution of genius made an impression on Daddy Doguereau.

"Let
him preserve these simple habits of life, this frugality, these modest
requirements," thought he.--Aloud he said: "It is a pleasure to me to
see you. Thus, sir, lived Jean-Jacques, whom you resemble in more ways
than one. Amid such surroundings the fire of genius shines brightly;
good work is done in such rooms as these. This is how men of letters
should work, instead of living riotously in cafes and restaurants,
wasting their time and talent and our money."

He sat down.

"Your
romance is not bad, young man. I was a professor of rhetoric once; I
know French history, there are some capital things in it. You have a
future before you, in fact."

"Oh! sir."

"No; I tell you so. We may do business together. I will buy your
romance."

Lucien's
heart swelled and throbbed with gladness. He was about to enter the
world of literature; he should see himself in print at last.

"I
will give you four hundred francs," continued Doguereau in honeyed
accents, and he looked at Lucien with an air which seemed to betoken an
effort of generosity.

"The volume?" queried Lucien.

"For
the romance," said Doguereau, heedless of Lucien's surprise. "In ready
money," he added; "and you shall undertake to write two books for me
every year for six years. If the first book is out of print in six
months, I will give you six hundred francs for the others. So, if you
write two books each year, you will be making a hundred francs a month;
you will have a sure income, you will be well off. There are some
authors whom I only pay three hundred francs for a romance; I give two
hundred for translations of English books. Such prices would have been
exorbitant in the old days."

"Sir, we cannot possibly come to an understanding. Give me back my
manuscript, I beg," said Lucien, in a cold chill.

"Here
it is," said the old bookseller. "You know nothing of business, sir.
Before an author's first book can appear, a publisher is bound to sink
sixteen hundred francs on the paper and the printing of it. It is
easier to write a romance than to find all that money. I have a hundred
romances in manuscript, and I have not a hundred and sixty thousand
francs in my cash box, alas! I have not made so much in all these
twenty years that I have been a bookseller. So you don't make a fortune
by printing romances, you see. Vidal and Porchon only take them of us
on conditions that grow harder and harder day by day. You have only
your time to lose, while I am obliged to disburse two thousand francs.
If we fail, _habent sua fata libelli_, I lose two thousand francs;
while, as for you, you simply hurl an ode at the thick-headed public.
When you have thought over this that I have the honor of telling you,
you will come back to me.--_You will come back to me_!" he asserted
authoritatively, by way of reply to a scornful gesture made
involuntarily by Lucien. "So far from finding a publisher obliging
enough to risk two thousand francs for an unknown writer, you will not
find a publisher's clerk that will trouble himself to look through your
screed. Now that I have read it I can point out a good many slips in
grammar. You have put _observer_ for _faire observer_ and _malgre que_.
_Malgre_ is a preposition, and requires an object."

Lucien appeared to be humiliated.

"When I see you again, you will have lost a hundred francs," he added.
"I shall only give a hundred crowns."

With
that he rose and took his leave. On the threshold he said, "If you had
not something in you, and a future before you; if I did not take an
interest in studious youth, I should not have made you such a handsome
offer. A hundred francs per month! Think of it! After all, a romance in
a drawer is not eating its head off like a horse in a stable, nor will
it find you in victuals either, and that's a fact."

Lucien snatched up his manuscript and dashed it on the floor.

"I would rather burn it, sir!" he exclaimed.

"You have a poet's head," returned his senior.

Lucien
devoured his bread and supped his bowl of milk, then he went
downstairs. His room was not large enough for him; he was turning round
and round in it like a lion in a cage at the Jardin des Plantes.

At
the Bibliotheque Saint-Genevieve, whither Lucien was going, he had come
to know a stranger by sight; a young man of five-and-twenty or
thereabouts, working with the sustained industry which nothing can
disturb nor distract, the sign by which your genuine literary worker is
known. Evidently the young man had been reading there for some time,
for the librarian and attendants all knew him and paid him special
attention; the librarian would even allow him to take away books, with
which Lucien saw him return in the morning. In the stranger student he
recognized a brother in penury and hope.

Pale-faced and slight
and thin, with a fine forehead hidden by masses of black, tolerably
unkempt hair, there was something about him that attracted indifferent
eyes: it was a vague resemblance which he bore to portraits of the
young Bonaparte, engraved from Robert Lefebvre's picture. That
engraving is a poem of melancholy intensity, of suppressed ambition, of
power working below the surface. Study the face carefully, and you will
discover genius in it and discretion, and all the subtlety and
greatness of the man. The portrait has speaking eyes like a woman's;
they look out, greedy of space, craving difficulties to vanquish. Even
if the name of Bonaparte were not written beneath it, you would gaze
long at that face.

Lucien's young student, the incarnation of
this picture, usually wore footed trousers, shoes with thick soles to
them, an overcoat of coarse cloth, a black cravat, a waistcoat of some
gray-and-white material buttoned to the chin, and a cheap hat. Contempt
for superfluity in dress was visible in his whole person. Lucien also
discovered that the mysterious stranger with that unmistakable stamp
which genius sets upon the forehead of its slaves was one of
Flicoteaux's most regular customers; he ate to live, careless of the
fare which appeared to be familiar to him, and drank water. Wherever
Lucien saw him, at the library or at Flicoteaux's, there was a dignity
in his manner, springing doubtless from the consciousness of a purpose
that filled his life, a dignity which made him unapproachable. He had
the expression of a thinker, meditation dwelt on the fine nobly carved
brow. You could tell from the dark bright eyes, so clear-sighted and
quick to observe, that their owner was wont to probe to the bottom of
things. He gesticulated very little, his demeanor was grave. Lucien
felt an involuntary respect for him.

Many times already the pair
had looked at each other at the Bibliotheque or at Flicoteaux's; many
times they had been on the point of speaking, but neither of them had
ventured so far as yet. The silent young man went off to the further
end of the library, on the side at right angles to the Place de la
Sorbonne, and Lucien had no opportunity of making his acquaintance,
although he felt drawn to a worker whom he knew by indescribable tokens
for a character of no common order. Both, as they came to know
afterwards, were unsophisticated and shy, given to fears which cause a
pleasurable emotion to solitary creatures. Perhaps they never would
have been brought into communication if they had not come across each
other that day of Lucien's disaster; for as Lucien turned into the Rue
des Gres, he saw the student coming away from the Bibliotheque
Sainte-Genevieve.

"The library is closed; I don't know why, monsieur," said he.

Tears
were standing in Lucien's eyes; he expressed his thanks by one of those
gestures that speak more eloquently than words, and unlock hearts at
once when two men meet in youth. They went together along the Rue des
Gres towards the Rue de la Harpe.

"As that is so, I shall go to
the Luxembourg for a walk," said Lucien. "When you have come out, it is
not easy to settle down to work again."

"No; one's ideas will not flow in the proper current," remarked the
stranger. "Something seems to have annoyed you, monsieur?"

"I
have just had a queer adventure," said Lucien, and he told the history
of his visit to the Quai, and gave an account of his subsequent
dealings with the old bookseller. He gave his name and said a word or
two of his position. In one month or thereabouts he had spent sixty
francs on his board, thirty for lodging, twenty more francs in going to
the theatre, and ten at Blosse's reading room--one hundred and twenty
francs in all, and now he had just a hundred and twenty francs in hand.

"Your
story is mine, monsieur, and the story of ten or twelve hundred young
fellows besides who come from the country to Paris every year. There
are others even worse off than we are. Do you see that theatre?" he
continued, indicating the turrets of the Odeon. "There came one day to
lodge in one of the houses in the square a man of talent who had fallen
into the lowest depths of poverty. He was married, in addition to the
misfortunes which we share with him, to a wife whom he loved; and the
poorer or the richer, as you will, by two children. He was burdened
with debt, but he put his faith in his pen. He took a comedy in five
acts to the Odeon; the comedy was accepted, the management arranged to
bring it out, the actors learned their parts, the stage manager urged
on the rehearsals. Five several bits of luck, five dramas to be
performed in real life, and far harder tasks than the writing of a
five-act play. The poor author lodged in a garret; you can see the
place from here. He drained his last resources to live until the first
representation; his wife pawned her clothes, they all lived on dry
bread. On the day of the final rehearsal, the household owed fifty
francs in the Quarter to the baker, the milkwoman, and the porter. The
author had only the strictly necessary clothes--a coat, a shirt,
trousers, a waistcoat, and a pair of boots. He felt sure of his
success; he kissed his wife. The end of their troubles was at hand. 'At
last! There is nothing against us now,' cried he.--'Yes, there is
fire,' said his wife; 'look, the Odeon is on fire!'--The Odeon was on
fire, monsieur. So do not you complain. You have clothes, you have
neither wife nor child, you have a hundred and twenty francs for
emergencies in your pocket, and you owe no one a penny.--Well, the
piece went through a hundred and fifty representations at the Theatre
Louvois. The King allowed the author a pension. 'Genius is patience,'
as Buffon said. And patience after all is a man's nearest approach to
Nature's processes of creation. What is Art, monsieur, but Nature
concentrated?"

By this time the young men were striding along
the walks of the Luxembourg, and in no long time Lucien learned the
name of the stranger who was doing his best to administer comfort. That
name has since grown famous. Daniel d'Arthez is one of the most
illustrious of living men of letters; one of the rare few who show us
an example of "a noble gift with a noble nature combined," to quote a
poet's fine thought.

"There is no cheap route to greatness,"
Daniel went on in his kind voice. "The works of Genius are watered with
tears. The gift that is in you, like an existence in the physical
world, passes through childhood and its maladies. Nature sweeps away
sickly or deformed creatures, and Society rejects an imperfectly
developed talent. Any man who means to rise above the rest must make
ready for a struggle and be undaunted by difficulties. A great writer
is a martyr who does not die; that is all.--There is the stamp of
genius on your forehead," d'Arthez continued, enveloping Lucien by a
glance; "but unless you have within you the will of genius, unless you
are gifted with angelic patience, unless, no matter how far the freaks
of Fate have set you from your destined goal, you can find the way to
your Infinite as the turtles in the Indies find their way to the ocean,
you had better give up at once."

"Then do you yourself expect these ordeals?" asked Lucien.

"Trials
of every kind, slander and treachery, and effrontery and cunning, the
rivals who act unfairly, and the keen competition of the literary
market," his companion said resignedly. "What is a first loss, if only
your work was good?"

"Will you look at mine and give me your opinion?" asked Lucien.

"So
be it," said d'Arthez. "I am living in the Rue des Quatre-Vents.
Desplein, one of the most illustrious men of genius in our time, the
greatest surgeon that the world has known, once endured the martyrdom
of early struggles with the first difficulties of a glorious career in
the same house. I think of that every night, and the thought gives me
the stock of courage that I need every morning. I am living in the very
room where, like Rousseau, he had no Theresa. Come in an hour's time. I
shall be in."

The poets grasped each other's hands with a rush
of melancholy and tender feeling inexpressible in words, and went their
separate ways; Lucien to fetch his manuscript, Daniel d'Arthez to pawn
his watch and buy a couple of faggots. The weather was cold, and his
new-found friend should find a fire in his room.

Lucien was
punctual. He noticed at once that the house was of an even poorer class
than the Hotel de Cluny. A staircase gradually became visible at the
further end of a dark passage; he mounted to the fifth floor, and found
d'Arthez's room.

A bookcase of dark-stained wood, with rows of
labeled cardboard cases on the shelves, stood between the two crazy
windows. A gaunt, painted wooden bedstead, of the kind seen in school
dormitories, a night-table, picked up cheaply somewhere, and a couple
of horsehair armchairs, filled the further end of the room. The
wall-paper, a Highland plaid pattern, was glazed over with the grime of
years. Between the window and the grate stood a long table littered
with papers, and opposite the fireplace there was a cheap mahogany
chest of drawers. A second-hand carpet covered the floor--a necessary
luxury, for it saved firing. A common office armchair, cushioned with
leather, crimson once, but now hoary with wear, was drawn up to the
table. Add half-a-dozen rickety chairs, and you have a complete list of
the furniture. Lucien noticed an old-fashioned candle-sconce for a
card-table, with an adjustable screen attached, and wondered to see
four wax candles in the sockets. D'Arthez explained that he could not
endure the smell of tallow, a little trait denoting great delicacy of
sense perception, and the exquisite sensibility which accompanies it.

The
reading lasted for seven hours. Daniel listened conscientiously,
forbearing to interrupt by word or comment--one of the rarest proofs of
good taste in a listener.

"Well?" queried Lucien, laying the manuscript on the chimney-piece.

"You
have made a good start on the right way," d'Arthez answered judicially,
"but you must go over your work again. You must strike out a different
style for yourself if you do not mean to ape Sir Walter Scott, for you
have taken him for your model. You begin, for instance, as he begins,
with long conversations to introduce your characters, and only when
they have said their say does description and action follow.

"This
opposition, necessary in all work of a dramatic kind, comes last. Just
put the terms of the problem the other way round. Give descriptions, to
which our language lends itself so admirably, instead of diffuse
dialogue, magnificent in Scott's work, but colorless in your own. Lead
naturally up to your dialogue. Plunge straight into the action. Treat
your subject from different points of view, sometimes in a side-light,
sometimes retrospectively; vary your methods, in fact, to diversify
your work. You may be original while adapting the Scots novelist's form
of dramatic dialogue to French history. There is no passion in Scott's
novels; he ignores passion, or perhaps it was interdicted by the
hypocritical manners of his country. Woman for him is duty incarnate.
His heroines, with possibly one or two exceptions, are all alike; he
has drawn them all from the same model, as painters say. They are,
every one of them, descended from Clarissa Harlowe. And returning
continually, as he did, to the same idea of woman, how could he do
otherwise than produce a single type, varied only by degrees of
vividness in the coloring? Woman brings confusion into Society through
passion. Passion gives infinite possibilities. Therefore depict
passion; you have one great resource open to you, foregone by the great
genius for the sake of providing family reading for prudish England. In
France you have the charming sinner, the brightly-colored life of
Catholicism, contrasted with sombre Calvinistic figures on a background
of the times when passions ran higher than at any other period of our
history.

"Every epoch which has left authentic records since the
time of Charles the Great calls for at least one romance. Some require
four or five; the periods of Louis XIV., of Henry IV., of Francis I.,
for instance. You would give us in this way a picturesque history of
France, with the costumes and furniture, the houses and their
interiors, and domestic life, giving us the spirit of the time instead
of a laborious narration of ascertained facts. Then there is further
scope for originality. You can remove some of the popular delusions
which disfigure the memories of most of our kings. Be bold enough in
this first work of yours to rehabilitate the great magnificent figure
of Catherine, whom you have sacrificed to the prejudices which still
cloud her name. And finally, paint Charles IX. for us as he really was,
and not as Protestant writers have made him. Ten years of persistent
work, and fame and fortune will be yours."

By this time it was
nine o'clock; Lucien followed the example set in secret by his future
friend by asking him to dine at Eldon's, and spent twelve francs at
that restaurant. During the dinner Daniel admitted Lucien into the
secret of his hopes and studies. Daniel d'Arthez would not allow that
any writer could attain to a pre-eminent rank without a profound
knowledge of metaphysics. He was engaged in ransacking the spoils of
ancient and modern philosophy, and in the assimilation of it all; he
would be like Moliere, a profound philosopher first, and a writer of
comedies afterwards. He was studying the world of books and the living
world about him--thought and fact. His friends were learned
naturalists, young doctors of medicine, political writers and artists,
a number of earnest students full of promise.

D'Arthez earned a
living by conscientious and ill-paid work; he wrote articles for
encyclopaedias, dictionaries of biography and natural science, doing
just enough to enable him to live while he followed his own bent, and
neither more nor less. He had a piece of imaginative work on hand,
undertaken solely for the sake of studying the resources of language,
an important psychological study in the form of a novel, unfinished as
yet, for d'Arthez took it up or laid it down as the humor took him, and
kept it for days of great distress. D'Arthez's revelations of himself
were made very simply, but to Lucien he seemed like an intellectual
giant; and by eleven o'clock, when they left the restaurant, he began
to feel a sudden, warm friendship for this nature, unconscious of its
loftiness, this unostentatious worth.

Lucien took d'Arthez's
advice unquestioningly, and followed it out to the letter. The most
magnificent palaces of fancy had been suddenly flung open to him by a
nobly-gifted mind, matured already by thought and critical examinations
undertaken for their own sake, not for publication, but for the
solitary thinker's own satisfaction. The burning coal had been laid on
the lips of the poet of Angouleme, a word uttered by a hard student in
Paris had fallen upon ground prepared to receive it in the provincial.
Lucien set about recasting his work.

In his gladness at finding
in the wilderness of Paris a nature abounding in generous and
sympathetic feeling, the distinguished provincial did, as all young
creatures hungering for affection are wont to do; he fastened, like a
chronic disease, upon this one friend that he had found. He called for
D'Arthez on his way to the Bibliotheque, walked with him on fine days
in the Luxembourg Gardens, and went with his friend every evening as
far as the door of his lodging-house after sitting next to him at
Flicoteaux's. He pressed close to his friend's side as a soldier might
keep by a comrade on the frozen Russian plains.

During those
early days of his acquaintance, he noticed, not without chagrin, that
his presence imposed a certain restraint on the circle of Daniel's
intimates. The talk of those superior beings of whom d'Arthez spoke to
him with such concentrated enthusiasm kept within the bounds of a
reserve but little in keeping with the evident warmth of their
friendships. At these times Lucien discreetly took his leave, a feeling
of curiosity mingling with the sense of something like pain at the
ostracism to which he was subjected by these strangers, who all
addressed each other by their Christian names. Each one of them, like
d'Arthez, bore the stamp of genius upon his forehead.

After some
private opposition, overcome by d'Arthez without Lucien's knowledge,
the newcomer was at length judged worthy to make one of the _cenacle_
of lofty thinkers. Henceforward he was to be one of a little group of
young men who met almost every evening in d'Arthez's room, united by
the keenest sympathies and by the earnestness of their intellectual
life. They all foresaw a great writer in d'Arthez; they looked upon him
as their chief since the loss of one of their number, a mystical
genius, one of the most extraordinary intellects of the age. This
former leader had gone back to his province for reasons on which it
serves no purpose to enter, but Lucien often heard them speak of this
absent friend as "Louis." Several of the group were destined to fall by
the way; but others, like d'Arthez, have since won all the fame that
was their due. A few details as to the circle will readily explain
Lucien's strong feeling of interest and curiosity.

One among
those who still survive was Horace Bianchon, then a house-student at
the Hotel-Dieu; later, a shining light at the Ecole de Paris, and now
so well known that it is needless to give any description of his
appearance, genius, or character.

Next came Leon Giraud, that
profound philosopher and bold theorist, turning all systems inside out,
criticising, expressing, and formulating, dragging them all to the feet
of his idol--Humanity; great even in his errors, for his honesty
ennobled his mistakes. An intrepid toiler, a conscientious scholar, he
became the acknowledged head of a school of moralists and politicians.
Time alone can pronounce upon the merits of his theories; but if his
convictions have drawn him into paths in which none of his old comrades
tread, none the less he is still their faithful friend.

Art was
represented by Joseph Bridau, one of the best painters among the
younger men. But for a too impressionable nature, which made havoc of
Joseph's heart, he might have continued the traditions of the great
Italian masters, though, for that matter, the last word has not yet
been said concerning him. He combines Roman outline with Venetian
color; but love is fatal to his work, love not merely transfixes his
heart, but sends his arrow through the brain, deranges the course of
his life, and sets the victim describing the strangest zigzags. If the
mistress of the moment is too kind or too cruel, Joseph will send into
the Exhibition sketches where the drawing is clogged with color, or
pictures finished under the stress of some imaginary woe, in which he
gave his whole attention to the drawing, and left the color to take
care of itself. He is a constant disappointment to his friends and the
public; yet Hoffmann would have worshiped him for his daring
experiments in the realms of art. When Bridau is wholly himself he is
admirable, and as praise is sweet to him, his disgust is great when one
praises the failures in which he alone discovers all that is lacking in
the eyes of the public. He is whimsical to the last degree. His friends
have seen him destroy a finished picture because, in his eyes, it
looked too smooth. "It is overdone," he would say; "it is niggling
work."

With his eccentric, yet lofty nature, with a nervous
organization and all that it entails of torment and delight, the
craving for perfection becomes morbid. Intellectually he is akin to
Sterne, though he is not a literary worker. There is an indescribable
piquancy about his epigrams and sallies of thought. He is eloquent, he
knows how to love, but the uncertainty that appears in his execution is
a part of the very nature of the man. The brotherhood loved him for the
very qualities which the philistine would style defects.

Last
among the living comes Fulgence Ridal. No writer of our times possesses
more of the exuberant spirit of pure comedy than this poet, careless of
fame, who will fling his more commonplace productions to theatrical
managers, and keep the most charming scenes in the seraglio of his
brain for himself and his friends. Of the public he asks just
sufficient to secure his independence, and then declines to do anything
more. Indolent and prolific as Rossini, compelled, like great
poet-comedians, like Moliere and Rabelais, to see both sides of
everything, and all that is to be said both for and against, he is a
sceptic, ready to laugh at all things. Fulgence Ridal is a great
practical philosopher. His worldly wisdom, his genius for observation,
his contempt for fame ("fuss," as he calls it) have not seared a kind
heart. He is as energetic on behalf of another as he is careless where
his own interests are concerned; and if he bestirs himself, it is for a
friend. Living up to his Rabelaisian mask, he is no enemy to good
cheer, though he never goes out of his way to find it; he is melancholy
and gay. His friends dubbed him the "Dog of the Regiment." You could
have no better portrait of the man than his nickname.

Three more
of the band, at least as remarkable as the friends who have just been
sketched in outline, were destined to fall by the way. Of these,
Meyraux was the first. Meyraux died after stirring up the famous
controversy between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a great question
which divided the whole scientific world into two opposite camps, with
these two men of equal genius as leaders. This befell some months
before the death of the champion of rigorous analytical science as
opposed to the pantheism of one who is still living to bear an honored
name in Germany. Meyraux was the friend of that "Louis" of whom death
was so soon to rob the intellectual world.

With these two, both
marked by death, and unknown to-day in spite of their wide knowledge
and their genius, stands a third, Michel Chrestien, the great
Republican thinker, who dreamed of European Federation, and had no
small share in bringing about the Saint-Simonian movement of 1830. A
politician of the calibre of Saint-Just and Danton, but simple, meek as
a maid, and brimful of illusions and loving-kindness; the owner of a
singing voice which would have sent Mozart, or Weber, or Rossini into
ecstasies, for his singing of certain songs of Beranger's could
intoxicate the heart in you with poetry, or hope, or love--Michel
Chrestien, poor as Lucien, poor as Daniel d'Arthez, as all the rest of
his friends, gained a living with the haphazard indifference of a
Diogenes. He indexed lengthy works, he drew up prospectuses for
booksellers, and kept his doctrines to himself, as the grave keeps the
secrets of the dead. Yet the gay bohemian of intellectual life, the
great statesman who might have changed the face of the world, fell as a
private soldier in the cloister of Saint-Merri; some shopkeeper's
bullet struck down one of the noblest creatures that ever trod French
soil, and Michel Chrestien died for other doctrines than his own. His
Federation scheme was more dangerous to the aristocracy of Europe than
the Republican propaganda; it was more feasible and less extravagant
than the hideous doctrines of indefinite liberty proclaimed by the
young madcaps who assume the character of heirs of the Convention. All
who knew the noble plebeian wept for him; there is not one of them but
remembers, and often remembers, a great obscure politician.

Esteem
and friendship kept the peace between the extremes of hostile opinion
and conviction represented in the brotherhood. Daniel d'Arthez came of
a good family in Picardy. His belief in the Monarchy was quite as
strong as Michel Chrestien's faith in European Federation. Fulgence
Ridal scoffed at Leon Giraud's philosophical doctrines, while Giraud
himself prophesied for d'Arthez's benefit the approaching end of
Christianity and the extinction of the institution of the family.
Michel Chrestien, a believer in the religion of Christ, the divine
lawgiver, who taught the equality of men, would defend the immortality
of the soul from Bianchon's scalpel, for Horace Bianchon was before all
things an analyst.

There was plenty of discussion, but no
bickering. Vanity was not engaged, for the speakers were also the
audience. They would talk over their work among themselves and take
counsel of each other with the delightful openness of youth. If the
matter in hand was serious, the opponent would leave his own position
to enter into his friend's point of view; and being an impartial judge
in a matter outside his own sphere, would prove the better helper;
envy, the hideous treasure of disappointment, abortive talent, failure,
and mortified vanity, was quite unknown among them. All of them,
moreover, were going their separate ways. For these reasons, Lucien and
others admitted to their society felt at their ease in it. Wherever you
find real talent, you will find frank good fellowship and sincerity,
and no sort of pretension, the wit that caresses the intellect and
never is aimed at self-love.

When the first nervousness, caused
by respect, wore off, it was unspeakably pleasant to make one of this
elect company of youth. Familiarity did not exclude in each a
consciousness of his own value, nor a profound esteem for his neighbor;
and finally, as every member of the circle felt that he could afford to
receive or to give, no one made a difficulty of accepting. Talk was
unflagging, full of charm, and ranging over the most varied topics;
words light as arrows sped to the mark. There was a strange contrast
between the dire material poverty in which the young men lived and the
splendor of their intellectual wealth. They looked upon the practical
problems of existence simply as matter for friendly jokes. The cold
weather happened to set in early that year. Five of d'Arthez's friends
appeared one day, each concealing firewood under his cloak; the same
idea had occurred to the five, as it sometimes happens that all the
guests at a picnic are inspired with the notion of bringing a pie as
their contribution.

All of them were gifted with the moral
beauty which reacts upon the physical form, and, no less than work and
vigils, overlays a youthful face with a shade of divine gold; purity of
life and the fire of thought had brought refinement and regularity into
features somewhat pinched and rugged. The poet's amplitude of brow was
a striking characteristic common to them all; the bright, sparkling
eyes told of cleanliness of life. The hardships of penury, when they
were felt at all, were born so gaily and embraced with such enthusiasm,
that they had left no trace to mar the serenity peculiar to the faces
of the young who have no grave errors laid to their charge as yet, who
have not stooped to any of the base compromises wrung from impatience
of poverty by the strong desire to succeed. The temptation to use any
means to this end is the greater since that men of letters are lenient
with bad faith and extend an easy indulgence to treachery.

There
is an element in friendship which doubles its charm and renders it
indissoluble--a sense of certainty which is lacking in love. These
young men were sure of themselves and of each other; the enemy of one
was the enemy of all; the most urgent personal considerations would
have been shattered if they had clashed with the sacred solidarity of
their fellowship. All alike incapable of disloyalty, they could oppose
a formidable No to any accusation brought against the absent and defend
them with perfect confidence. With a like nobility of nature and
strength of feeling, it was possible to think and speak freely on all
matters of intellectual or scientific interest; hence the honesty of
their friendships, the gaiety of their talk, and with this intellectual
freedom of the community there was no fear of being misunderstood; they
stood upon no ceremony with each other; they shared their troubles and
joys, and gave thought and sympathy from full hearts. The charming
delicacy of feeling which makes the tale of _Deux Amis_ a treasury for
great souls, was the rule of their daily life. It may be imagined,
therefore, that their standard of requirements was not an easy one;
they were too conscious of their worth, too well aware of their
happiness, to care to trouble their life with the admixture of a new
and unknown element.

This federation of interests and affection
lasted for twenty years without a collision or disappointment. Death
alone could thin the numbers of the noble Pleiades, taking first Louis
Lambert, later Meyraux and Michel Chrestien.

When Michel
Chrestien fell in 1832 his friends went, in spite of the perils of the
step, to find his body at Saint-Merri; and Horace Bianchon, Daniel
d'Arthez, Leon Giraud, Joseph Bridau, and Fulgence Ridal performed the
last duties to the dead, between two political fires. By night they
buried their beloved in the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise; Horace Bianchon,
undaunted by the difficulties, cleared them away one after another--it
was he indeed who besought the authorities for permission to bury the
fallen insurgent and confessed to his old friendship with the dead
Federalist. The little group of friends present at the funeral with
those five great men will never forget that touching scene.

As
you walk in the trim cemetery you will see a grave purchased in
perpetuity, a grass-covered mound with a dark wooden cross above it,
and the name in large red letters--MICHEL CHRESTIEN. There is no other
monument like it. The friends thought to pay a tribute to the sternly
simple nature of the man by the simplicity of the record of his death.

So,
in that chilly garret, the fairest dreams of friendship were realized.
These men were brothers leading lives of intellectual effort, loyally
helping each other, making no reservations, not even of their worst
thoughts; men of vast acquirements, natures tried in the crucible of
poverty. Once admitted as an equal among such elect souls, Lucien
represented beauty and poetry. They admired the sonnets which he read
to them; they would ask him for a sonnet as he would ask Michel
Chrestien for a song. And, in the desert of Paris, Lucien found an
oasis in the Rue des Quatre-Vents.

At the beginning of October,
Lucien had spent the last of his money on a little firewood; he was
half-way through the task of recasting his work, the most strenuous of
all toil, and he was penniless. As for Daniel d'Arthez, burning blocks
of spent tan, and facing poverty like a hero, not a word of complaint
came from him; he was as sober as any elderly spinster, and methodical
as a miser. This courage called out Lucien's courage; he had only newly
come into the circle, and shrank with invincible repugnance from
speaking of his straits. One morning he went out, manuscript in hand,
and reached the Rue du Coq; he would sell _The Archer of Charles IX._
to Doguereau; but Doguereau was out. Lucien little knew how indulgent
great natures can be to the weaknesses of others. Every one of the
friends had thought of the peculiar troubles besetting the poetic
temperament, of the prostration which follows upon the struggle, when
the soul has been overwrought by the contemplation of that nature which
it is the task of art to reproduce. And strong as they were to endure
their own ills, they felt keenly for Lucien's distress; they guessed
that his stock of money was failing; and after all the pleasant
evenings spent in friendly talk and deep meditations, after the poetry,
the confidences, the bold flights over the fields of thought or into
the far future of the nations, yet another trait was to prove how
little Lucien had understood these new friends of his.

"Lucien, dear fellow," said Daniel, "you did not dine at Flicoteaux's
yesterday, and we know why."

Lucien could not keep back the overflowing tears.

"You
showed a want of confidence in us," said Michel Chrestien; "we shall
chalk that up over the chimney, and when we have scored ten we will----"

"We
have all of us found a bit of extra work," said Bianchon; "for my own
part, I have been looking after a rich patient for Desplein; d'Arthez
has written an article for the _Revue Encyclopedique_; Chrestien
thought of going out to sing in the Champs Elysees of an evening with a
pocket-handkerchief and four candles, but he found a pamphlet to write
instead for a man who has a mind to go into politics, and gave his
employer six hundred francs worth of Machiavelli; Leon Giraud borrowed
fifty francs of his publisher, Joseph sold one or two sketches; and
Fulgence's piece was given on Sunday, and there was a full house."

"Here are two hundred francs," said Daniel, "and let us say no more
about it."

"Why, if he is not going to hug us all as if we had done something
extraordinary!" cried Chrestien.

Lucien,
meanwhile, had written to the home circle. His letter was a masterpiece
of sensibility and goodwill, as well as a sharp cry wrung from him by
distress. The answers which he received the next day will give some
idea of the delight that Lucien took in this living encyclopedia of
angelic spirits, each of whom bore the stamp of the art or science
which he followed:--

_David Sechard to Lucien._

"MY DEAR LUCIEN,--Enclosed herewith is a bill at ninety days, payable
to your order, for two hundred francs. You can draw on M. Metivier,
paper merchant, our Paris correspondent in the Rue Serpente. My good
Lucien, we have absolutely nothing. Eve has undertaken the charge of
the printing-house, and works at her task with such devotion, patience,
and industry, that I bless heaven for giving me such an angel for a
wife. She herself says that it is impossible to send you the least
help. But I think, my friend now that you are started in so promising a
way, with such great and noble hearts for your companions, that you can
hardly fail to reach the greatness to which you were born, aided as you
are by intelligence almost divine in Daniel d'Arthez and Michel
Chrestien and Leon Giraud, and counseled by Meyraux and Bianchon and
Ridal, whom we have come to know through your dear letter. So I have
drawn this bill without Eve's knowledge, and I will contrive somehow to
meet it when the time comes. Keep on your way, Lucien; it is rough, but
it will be glorious. I can bear anything but the thought of you sinking
into the sloughs of Paris, of which I saw so much. Have sufficient
strength of mind to do as you are doing, and keep out of scrapes and
bad company, wild young fellows and men of letters of a certain stamp,
whom I learned to take at their just valuation when I lived in Paris.
Be a worthy compeer of the divine spirits whom we have learned to love
through you. Your life will soon meet with its reward. Farewell,
dearest brother; you have sent transports of joy to my heart. I did not
expect such courage of you.

"DAVID."

_Eve Sechard to Lucien._

"DEAR,--your letter made all of us cry. As for the noble hearts to whom
your good angel surely led you, tell them that a mother and a poor
young wife will pray for them night and morning; and if the most
fervent prayers can reach the Throne of God, surely they will bring
blessings upon you all. Their names are engraved upon my heart. Ah!
some day I shall see your friends; I will go to Paris, if I have to
walk the whole way, to thank them for their friendship for you, for to
me the thought has been like balm to smarting wounds. We are working
like day laborers here, dear. This husband of mine, the unknown great
man whom I love more and more every day, as I discover moment by moment
the wealth of his nature, leaves the printing-house more and more to
me. Why, I guess. Our poverty, yours, and ours, and our mother's, is
heartbreaking to him. Our adored David is a Prometheus gnawed by a
vulture, a haggard, sharp-beaked regret. As for himself, noble fellow,
he scarcely thinks of himself; he is hoping to make a fortune for _us_.
He spends his whole time in experiments in paper-making; he begged me
to take his place and look after the business, and gives me as much
help as his preoccupation allows. Alas! I shall be a mother soon. That
should have been a crowning joy; but as things are, it saddens me. Poor
mother! she has grown young again; she has found strength to go back to
her tiring nursing. We should be happy if it were not for these money
cares. Old Father Sechard will not give his son a farthing. David went
over to see if he could borrow a little for you, for we were in despair
over your letter. 'I know Lucien,' David said; 'he will lose his head
and do something rash.'--I gave him a good scolding. 'My brother
disappoint us in any way!' I told him, 'Lucien knows that I should die
of sorrow.'--Mother and I have pawned a few things; David does not know
about it, mother will redeem them as soon as she has made a little
money. In this way we have managed to put together a hundred francs,
which I am sending you by the coach. If I did not answer your last
letter, do not remember it against me, dear; we were working all night
just then. I have been working like a man. Oh, I had no idea that I was
so strong!

"Mme. de Bargeton is a heartless woman; she has no
soul; even if she cared for you no longer, she owed it to herself to
use her influence for you and to help you when she had torn you from us
to plunge you into that dreadful sea of Paris. Only by the special
blessing of Heaven could you have met with true friends there among
those crowds of men and innumerable interests. She is not worth a
regret. I used to wish that there might be some devoted woman always
with you, a second myself; but now I know that your friends will take
my place, and I am happy. Spread your wings, my dear great genius, you
will be our pride as well as our beloved.

"EVE."

"My
darling," the mother wrote, "I can only add my blessing to all that
your sister says, and assure you that you are more in my thoughts and
in my prayers (alas!) than those whom I see daily; for some hearts, the
absent are always in the right, and so it is with the heart of your
mother."

So two days after the loan was offered so graciously,
Lucien repaid it. Perhaps life had never seemed so bright to him as at
that moment; but the touch of self-love in his joy did not escape the
delicate sensibility and searching eyes of his friends.

"Any one might think that you were afraid to owe us anything,"
exclaimed Fulgence.

"Oh!
the pleasure that he takes in returning the money is a very serious
symptom to my mind," said Michel Chrestien. "It confirms some
observations of my own. There is a spice of vanity in Lucien."

"He is a poet," said d'Arthez.

"But do you grudge me such a very natural feeling?" asked Lucien.

"We
should bear in mind that he did not hide it," said Leon Giraud; "he is
still open with us; but I am afraid that he may come to feel shy of us."

"And why?" Lucien asked.

"We can read your thoughts," answered Joseph Bridau.

"There
is a diabolical spirit in you that will seek to justify courses which
are utterly contrary to our principles. Instead of being a sophist in
theory, you will be a sophist in practice."

"Ah! I am afraid of
that," said d'Arthez. "You will carry on admirable debates in your own
mind, Lucien, and take up a lofty position in theory, and end by
blameworthy actions. You will never be at one with yourself."

"What ground have you for these charges?"

"Thy
vanity, dear poet, is so great that it intrudes itself even into thy
friendships!" cried Fulgence. "All vanity of that sort is a symptom of
shocking egoism, and egoism poisons friendship."

"Oh! dear," said Lucien, "you cannot know how much I love you all."

"If
you loved us as we love you, would you have been in such a hurry to
return the money which we had such pleasure in lending? or have made so
much of it?"

"We don't lend here; we give," said Joseph Bridau roughly.

"Don't
think us unkind, dear boy," said Michel Chrestien; "we are looking
forward. We are afraid lest some day you may prefer a petty revenge to
the joys of pure friendship. Read Goethe's _Tasso_, the great master's
greatest work, and you will see how the poet-hero loved gorgeous stuffs
and banquets and triumph and applause. Very well, be Tasso without his
folly. Perhaps the world and its pleasures tempt you? Stay with us.
Carry all the cravings of vanity into the world of imagination.
Transpose folly. Keep virtue for daily wear, and let imagination run
riot, instead of doing, as d'Arthez says, thinking high thoughts and
living beneath them."

Lucien hung his head. His friends were right.

"I
confess that you are stronger than I," he said, with a charming glance
at them. "My back and shoulders are not made to bear the burden of
Paris life; I cannot struggle bravely. We are born with different
temperaments and faculties, and you know better than I that faults and
virtues have their reverse side. I am tired already, I confess."

"We will stand by you," said d'Arthez; "it is just in these ways that a
faithful friendship is of use."

"The
help that I have just received is precarious, and every one of us is
just as poor as another; want will soon overtake me again. Chrestien,
at the service of the first that hires him, can do nothing with the
publishers; Bianchon is quite out of it; d'Arthez's booksellers only
deal in scientific and technical books--they have no connection with
publishers of new literature; and as for Horace and Fulgence Ridal and
Bridau, their work lies miles away from the booksellers. There is no
help for it; I must make up my mind one way or another."

"Stick by us, and make up your mind to it," said Bianchon. "Bear up
bravely, and trust in hard work."

"But what is hardship for you is death for me," Lucien put in quickly.

"Before
the cock crows thrice," smiled Leon Giraud, "this man will betray the
cause of work for an idle life and the vices of Paris."

"Where has work brought you?" asked Lucien, laughing.

"When
you start out from Paris for Italy, you don't find Rome half-way," said
Joseph Bridau. "You want your pease to grow ready buttered for you."

The
conversation ended in a joke, and they changed the subject. Lucien's
friends, with their perspicacity and delicacy of heart, tried to efface
the memory of the little quarrel; but Lucien knew thenceforward that it
was no easy matter to deceive them. He soon fell into despair, which he
was careful to hide from such stern mentors as he imagined them to be;
and the Southern temper that runs so easily through the whole gamut of
mental dispositions, set him making the most contradictory resolutions.

Again
and again he talked of making the plunge into journalism; and time
after time did his friends reply with a "Mind you do nothing of the
sort!"

"It would be the tomb of the beautiful, gracious Lucien whom we love
and know," said d'Arthez.

"You
would not hold out for long between the two extremes of toil and
pleasure which make up a journalist's life, and resistance is the very
foundation of virtue. You would be so delighted to exercise your power
of life and death over the offspring of the brain, that you would be an
out-and-out journalist in two months' time. To be a journalist --that
is to turn Herod in the republic of letters. The man who will say
anything will end by sticking at nothing. That was Napoleon's maxim,
and it explains itself."

"But you would be with me, would you not?" asked Lucien.

"Not
by that time," said Fulgence. "If you were a journalist, you would no
more think of us than the Opera girl in all her glory, with her adorers
and her silk-lined carriage, thinks of the village at home and her cows
and her sabots. You could never resist the temptation to pen a
witticism, though it should bring tears to a friend's eyes. I come
across journalists in theatre lobbies; it makes me shudder to see them.
Journalism is an inferno, a bottomless pit of iniquity and treachery
and lies; no one can traverse it undefiled, unless, like Dante, he is
protected by Virgil's sacred laurel."

But the more the set of
friends opposed the idea of journalism, the more Lucien's desire to
know its perils grew and tempted him. He began to debate within his own
mind; was it not ridiculous to allow want to find him a second time
defenceless? He bethought him of the failure of his attempts to dispose
of his first novel, and felt but little tempted to begin a second. How,
besides, was he to live while he was writing another romance? One month
of privation had exhausted his stock of patience. Why should he not do
nobly that which journalists did ignobly and without principle? His
friends insulted him with their doubts; he would convince them of his
strength of mind. Some day, perhaps, he would be of use to them; he
would be the herald of their fame!

"And what sort of a
friendship is it which recoils from complicity?" demanded he one
evening of Michel Chrestien; Lucien and Leon Giraud were walking home
with their friend.

"We shrink from nothing," Michel Chrestien
made reply. "If you were so unlucky as to kill your mistress, I would
help you to hide your crime, and could still respect you; but if you
were to turn spy, I should shun you with abhorrence, for a spy is
systematically shameless and base. There you have journalism summed up
in a sentence. Friendship can pardon error and the hasty impulse of
passion; it is bound to be inexorable when a man deliberately traffics
in his own soul, and intellect, and opinions."

"Why cannot I turn journalist to sell my volume of poetry and the
novel, and then give up at once?"

"Machiavelli might do so, but not Lucien de Rubempre," said Leon Giraud.

"Very well," exclaimed Lucien; "I will show you that I can do as much
as Machiavelli."

"Oh!"
cried Michel, grasping Leon's hand, "you have done it, Leon. --Lucien,"
he continued, "you have three hundred francs in hand; you can live
comfortably for three months; very well, then, work hard and write
another romance. D'Arthez and Fulgence will help you with the plot; you
will improve, you will be a novelist. And I, meanwhile, will enter one
of those _lupanars_ of thought; for three months I will be a
journalist. I will sell your books to some bookseller or other by
attacking his publications; I will write the articles myself; I will
get others for you. We will organize a success; you shall be a great
man, and still remain our Lucien."

"You must despise me very much, if you think that I should perish while
you escape," said the poet.

"O Lord, forgive him; it is a child!" cried Michel Chrestien.

When
Lucien's intellect had been stimulated by the evenings spent in
d'Arthez's garret, he had made some study of the jokes and articles in
the smaller newspapers. He was at least the equal, he felt, of the
wittiest contributors; in private he tried some mental gymnastics of
the kind, and went out one morning with the triumphant idea of finding
some colonel of such light skirmishers of the press and enlisting in
their ranks. He dressed in his best and crossed the bridges, thinking
as he went that authors, journalists, and men of letters, his future
comrades, in short, would show him rather more kindness and
disinterestedness than the two species of booksellers who had so dashed
his hopes. He should meet with fellow-feeling, and something of the
kindly and grateful affection which he found in the _cenacle_ of the
Rue des Quatre-Vents. Tormented by emotion, consequent upon the
presentiments to which men of imagination cling so fondly, half
believing, half battling with their belief in them, he arrived in the
Rue Saint-Fiacre off the Boulevard Montmartre. Before a house, occupied
by the offices of a small newspaper, he stopped, and at the sight of it
his heart began to throb as heavily as the pulses of a youth upon the
threshold of some evil haunt.

Nevertheless, upstairs he went,
and found the offices in the low _entresol_ between the ground floor
and the first story. The first room was divided down the middle by a
partition, the lower half of solid wood, the upper lattice work to the
ceiling. In this apartment Lucien discovered a one-armed pensioner
supporting several reams of paper on his head with his remaining hand,
while between his teeth he held the passbook which the Inland Revenue
Department requires every newspaper to produce with each issue. This
ill-favored individual, owner of a yellow countenance covered with red
excrescences, to which he owed his nickname of "Coloquinte," indicated
a personage behind the lattice as the Cerberus of the paper. This was
an elderly officer with a medal on his chest and a silk skull-cap on
his head; his nose was almost hidden by a pair of grizzled moustaches,
and his person was hidden as completely in an ample blue overcoat as
the body of the turtle in its carapace.

"From what date do you wish your subscription to commence, sir?"
inquired the Emperor's officer.

"I
did not come about a subscription," returned Lucien. Looking about him,
he saw a placard fastened on a door, corresponding to the one by which
he had entered, and read the words--EDITOR'S OFFICE, and below, in
smaller letters, _No admittance except on business_.

"A
complaint, I expect?" replied the veteran. "Ah! yes; we have been hard
on Mariette. What would you have? I don't know the why and wherefore of
it yet.--But if you want satisfaction, I am ready for you," he added,
glancing at a collection of small arms and foils stacked in a corner,
the armory of the modern warrior.

"That was still further from my intention, sir. I have come to speak to
the editor."

"Nobody is ever here before four o'clock."

"Look
you here, Giroudeau, old chap," remarked a voice, "I make it eleven
columns; eleven columns at five francs apiece is fifty-five francs, and
I have only been paid forty; so you owe me another fifteen francs, as I
have been telling you."

These words proceeded from a little
weasel-face, pallid and semi-transparent as the half-boiled white of an
egg; two slits of eyes looked out of it, mild blue in tint, but
appallingly malignant in expression; and the owner, an insignificant
young man, was completely hidden by the veteran's opaque person. It was
a blood-curdling voice, a sound between the mewing of a cat and the
wheezy chokings of a hyena.

"Yes, yes, my little militiaman,"
retorted he of the medal, "but you are counting the headings and white
lines. I have Finot's instructions to add up the totals of the lines,
and to divide them by the proper number for each column; and after I
performed that concentrating operation on your copy, there were three
columns less."

"He doesn't pay for the blanks, the Jew! He
reckons them in though when he sends up the total of his work to his
partner, and he gets paid for them too. I will go and see Etienne
Lousteau, Vernou----"

"I cannot go beyond my orders, my boy,"
said the veteran. "What! do you cry out against your foster-mother for
a matter of fifteen francs? you that turn out an article as easily as I
smoke a cigar. Fifteen francs! why, you will give a bowl of punch to
your friends, or win an extra game of billiards, and there's an end of
it!"

"Finot's savings will cost him very dear," said the contributor as he
took his departure.

"Now,
would not anybody think that he was Rousseau and Voltaire rolled in
one?" the cashier remarked to himself as he glanced at Lucien.

"I will come in again at four, sir," said Lucien.

While
the argument proceeded, Lucien had been looking about him. He saw upon
the walls the portraits of Benjamin Constant, General Foy, and the
seventeen illustrious orators of the Left, interspersed with
caricatures at the expense of the Government; but he looked more
particularly at the door of the sanctuary where, no doubt, the paper
was elaborated, the witty paper that amused him daily, and enjoyed the
privilege of ridiculing kings and the most portentous events, of
calling anything and everything in question with a jest. Then he
sauntered along the boulevards. It was an entirely novel amusement; and
so agreeable did he find it, that, looking at the turret clocks, he saw
the hour hands were pointing to four, and only then remembered that he
had not breakfasted.

He went at once in the direction of the Rue Saint-Fiacre, climbed the
stair, and opened the door.

The
veteran officer was absent; but the old pensioner, sitting on a pile of
stamped papers, was munching a crust and acting as sentinel resignedly.
Coloquinte was as much accustomed to his work in the office as to the
fatigue duty of former days, understanding as much or as little about
it as the why and wherefore of forced marches made by the Emperor's
orders. Lucien was inspired with the bold idea of deceiving that
formidable functionary. He settled his hat on his head, and walked into
the editor's office as if he were quite at home.

Looking eagerly
about him, he beheld a round table covered with a green cloth, and
half-a-dozen cherry-wood chairs, newly reseated with straw. The colored
brick floor had not been waxed, but it was clean; so clean that the
public, evidently, seldom entered the room. There was a mirror above
the chimney-piece, and on the ledge below, amid a sprinkling of
visiting-cards, stood a shopkeeper's clock, smothered with dust, and a
couple of candlesticks with tallow dips thrust into their sockets. A
few antique newspapers lay on the table beside an inkstand containing
some black lacquer-like substance, and a collection of quill pens
twisted into stars. Sundry dirty scraps of paper, covered with almost
undecipherable hieroglyphs, proved to be manuscript articles torn
across the top by the compositor to check off the sheets as they were
set up. He admired a few rather clever caricatures, sketched on bits of
brown paper by somebody who evidently had tried to kill time by killing
something else to keep his hand in.

Other works of art were
pinned in the cheap sea-green wall-paper. These consisted of nine
pen-and-ink illustrations for _Le Solitaire_. The work had attained to
such an unheard-of European popularity, that journalists evidently were
tired of it.--"The Solitary makes his first appearance in the
provinces; sensation among the women.--The Solitary perused at a
chateau.--Effect of the Solitary on domestic animals. --The Solitary
explained to savage tribes, with the most brilliant results.--The
Solitary translated into Chinese and presented by the author to the
Emperor at Pekin.--The Mont Sauvage, Rape of Elodie." --(Lucien though
this caricature very shocking, but he could not help laughing at
it.)--"The Solitary under a canopy conducted in triumphal procession by
the newspapers.--The Solitary breaks the press to splinters, and wounds
the printers.--Read backwards, the superior beauties of the Solitary
produce a sensation at the Academie."--On a newspaper-wrapper Lucien
noticed a sketch of a contributor holding out his hat, and beneath it
the words, "Finot! my hundred francs," and a name, since grown more
notorious than famous.

Between the window and the chimney-piece
stood a writing-table, a mahogany armchair, and a waste-paper basket on
a strip of hearth-rug; the dust lay thick on all these objects. There
were short curtains in the windows. About a score of new books lay on
the writing-table, deposited there apparently during the day, together
with prints, music, snuff-boxes of the "Charter" pattern, a copy of the
ninth edition of _Le Solitaire_ (the great joke of the moment), and
some ten unopened letters.

Lucien had taken stock of this
strange furniture, and made reflections of the most exhaustive kind
upon it, when, the clock striking five, he returned to question the
pensioner. Coloquinte had finished his crust, and was waiting with the
patience of a commissionaire, for the man of medals, who perhaps was
taking an airing on the boulevard.

At this conjuncture the
rustle of a dress sounded on the stair, and the light unmistakable
footstep of a woman on the threshold. The newcomer was passably pretty.
She addressed herself to Lucien.

"Sir," she said, "I know why
you cry up Mlle. Virginie's hats so much; and I have come to put down
my name for a year's subscription in the first place; but tell me your
conditions----"

"I am not connected with the paper, madame."

"Oh!"

"A subscription dating from October?" inquired the pensioner.

"What does the lady want to know?" asked the veteran, reappearing on
the scene.

The
fair milliner and the retired military man were soon deep in converse;
and when Lucien, beginning to lose patience, came back to the first
room, he heard the conclusion of the matter.

"Why, I shall be
delighted, quite delighted, sir. Mlle. Florentine can come to my shop
and choose anything she likes. Ribbons are in my department. So it is
all quite settled. You will say no more about Virginie, a botcher that
cannot design a new shape, while I have ideas of my own, I have."

Lucien heard a sound as of coins dropping into a cashbox, and the
veteran began to make up his books for the day.

"I have been waiting here for an hour, sir," Lucien began, looking not
a little annoyed.

"And
'they' have not come yet!" exclaimed Napoleon's veteran, civilly
feigning concern. "I am not surprised at that. It is some time since I
have seen 'them' here. It is the middle of the month, you see. Those
fine fellows only turn up on pay days--the 29th or the 30th."

"And M. Finot?" asked Lucien, having caught the editor's name.

"He
is in the Rue Feydeau, that's where he lives. Coloquinte, old chap,
just take him everything that has come in to-day when you go with the
paper to the printers."

"Where is the newspaper put together?" Lucien said to himself.

"The
newspaper?" repeated the officer, as he received the rest of the stamp
money from Coloquinte, "the newspaper?--broum! broum!--(Mind you are
round at the printers' by six o'clock to-morrow, old chap, to send off
the porters.)--The newspaper, sir, is written in the street, at the
writers' houses, in the printing-office between eleven and twelve
o'clock at night. In the Emperor's time, sir, these shops for spoiled
paper were not known. Oh! he would have cleared them out with four men
and a corporal; they would not have come over _him_ with their talk.
But that is enough of prattling. If my nephew finds it worth his while,
and so long as they write for the son of the Other (broum! broum!)
----after all, there is no harm in that. Ah! by the way, subscribers
don't seem to me to be advancing in serried columns; I shall leave my
post."

"You seem to know all about the newspaper, sir," Lucien began.

"From
a business point of view, broum! broum!" coughed the soldier, clearing
his throat. "From three to five francs per column, according to
ability.--Fifty lines to a column, forty letters to a line; no blanks;
there you are! As for the staff, they are queer fish, little youngsters
whom I wouldn't take on for the commissariat; and because they make fly
tracks on sheets of white paper, they look down, forsooth, on an old
Captain of Dragoons of the Guard, that retired with a major's rank
after entering every European capital with Napoleon."

The
soldier of Napoleon brushed his coat, and made as if he would go out,
but Lucien, swept to the door, had courage enough to make a stand.

"I
came to be a contributor of the paper," he said. "I am full of respect,
I vow and declare, for a captain of the Imperial Guard, those men of
bronze----"

"Well said, my little civilian, there are several
kinds of contributors; which kind do you wish to be?" replied the
trooper, bearing down on Lucien, and descending the stairs. At the foot
of the flight he stopped, but it was only to light a cigar at the
porter's box.

"If any subscribers come, you see them and take
note of them, Mother Chollet.--Simply subscribers, never know anything
but subscribers," he added, seeing that Lucien followed him. "Finot is
my nephew; he is the only one of my family that has done anything to
relieve me in my position. So when anybody comes to pick a quarrel with
Finot, he finds old Giroudeau, Captain of the Dragoons of the Guard,
that set out as a private in a cavalry regiment in the army of the
Sambre-et-Meuse, and was fencing-master for five years to the First
Hussars, army of Italy! One, two, and the man that had any complaints
to make would be turned off into the dark," he added, making a lunge.
"Now writers, my boy, are in different corps; there is the writer who
writes and draws his pay; there is the writer who writes and gets
nothing (a volunteer we call him); and, lastly, there is the writer who
writes nothing, and he is by no means the stupidest, for he makes no
mistakes; he gives himself out for a literary man, he is on the paper,
he treats us to dinners, he loafs about the theatres, he keeps an
actress, he is very well off. What do you mean to be?"

"The man that does good work and gets good pay."

"You
are like the recruits. They all want to be marshals of France. Take old
Giroudeau's word for it, and turn right about, in double-quick time,
and go and pick up nails in the gutter like that good fellow yonder;
you can tell by the look of him that he has been in the army.--Isn't it
a shame that an old soldier who has walked into the jaws of death
hundreds of times should be picking up old iron in the streets of
Paris? Ah! God A'mighty! 'twas a shabby trick to desert the
Emperor.--Well, my boy, the individual you saw this morning has made
his forty francs a month. Are you going to do better? And, according to
Finot, he is the cleverest man on the staff."

"When you enlisted in the Sambre-et-Meuse, did they talk about danger?"

"Rather."

"Very well?"

"Very
well. Go and see my nephew Finot, a good fellow, as good a fellow as
you will find, if you can find him, that is, for he is like a fish,
always on the move. In his way of business, there is no writing, you
see, it is setting others to write. That sort like gallivanting about
with actresses better than scribbling on sheets of paper, it seems. Oh!
they are queer customers, they are. Hope I may have the honor of seeing
you again."

With that the cashier raised his formidable loaded
cane, one of the defenders of Germainicus, and walked off, leaving
Lucien in the street, as much bewildered by this picture of the
newspaper world as he had formerly been by the practical aspects of
literature at Messrs. Vidal and Porchon's establishment.

Ten
several times did Lucien repair to the Rue Feydeau in search of Andoche
Finot, and ten times he failed to find that gentleman. He went first
thing in the morning; Finot had not come in. At noon, Finot had gone
out; he was breakfasting at such and such a cafe. At the cafe, in
answer to inquiries of the waitress, made after surmounting unspeakable
repugnance, Lucien heard that Finot had just left the place. Lucien, at
length tired out, began to regard Finot as a mythical and fabulous
character; it appeared simpler to waylay Etienne Lousteau at
Flicoteaux's. That youthful journalist would, doubtless, explain the
mysteries that enveloped the paper for which he wrote.

Since the
day, a hundred times blessed, when Lucien made the acquaintance of
Daniel d'Arthez, he had taken another seat at Flicoteaux's. The two
friends dined side by side, talking in lowered voices of the higher
literature, of suggested subjects, and ways of presenting, opening up,
and developing them. At the present time Daniel d'Arthez was correcting
the manuscript of _The Archer of Charles IX._ He reconstructed whole
chapters, and wrote the fine passages found therein, as well as the
magnificent preface, which is, perhaps, the best thing in the book, and
throws so much light on the work of the young school of literature. One
day it so happened that Daniel had been waiting for Lucien, who now sat
with his friend's hand in his own, when he saw Etienne Lousteau turn
the door-handle. Lucien instantly dropped Daniel's hand, and told the
waiter that he would dine at his old place by the counter. D'Arthez
gave Lucien a glance of divine kindness, in which reproach was wrapped
in forgiveness. The glance cut the poet to the quick; he took Daniel's
hand and grasped it anew.

"It is an important question of business for me; I will tell you about
it afterwards," said he.

Lucien
was in his old place by the time that Lousteau reached the table; as
the first comer, he greeted his acquaintance; they soon struck up a
conversation, which grew so lively that Lucien went off in search of
the manuscript of the _Marguerites_, while Lousteau finished his
dinner. He had obtained leave to lay his sonnets before the journalist,
and mistook the civility of the latter for willingness to find him a
publisher, or a place on the paper. When Lucien came hurrying back
again, he saw d'Arthez resting an elbow on the table in a corner of the
restaurant, and knew that his friend was watching him with melancholy
eyes, but he would not see d'Arthez just then; he felt the sharp pangs
of poverty, the goadings of ambition, and followed Lousteau.

In
the late afternoon the journalist and the neophyte went to the
Luxembourg, and sat down under the trees in that part of the gardens
which lies between the broad Avenue de l'Observatoire and the Rue de
l'Ouest. The Rue de l'Ouest at that time was a long morass, bounded by
planks and market-gardens; the houses were all at the end nearest the
Rue de Vaugirard; and the walk through the gardens was so little
frequented, that at the hour when Paris dines, two lovers might fall
out and exchange the earnest of reconciliation without fear of
intruders. The only possible spoil-sport was the pensioner on duty at
the little iron gate on the Rue de l'Ouest, if that gray-headed veteran
should take it into his head to lengthen his monotonous beat. There, on
a bench beneath the lime-trees, Etienne Lousteau sat and listened to
sample-sonnets from the _Marguerites_.

Etienne Lousteau, after a
two-years' apprenticeship, was on the staff of a newspaper; he had his
foot in the stirrup; he reckoned some of the celebrities of the day
among his friends; altogether, he was an imposing personage in Lucien's
eyes. Wherefore, while Lucien untied the string about the
_Marguerites_, he judged it necessary to make some sort of preface.

"The
sonnet, monsieur," said he, "is one of the most difficult forms of
poetry. It has fallen almost entirely into disuse. No Frenchman can
hope to rival Petrarch; for the language in which the Italian wrote,
being so infinitely more pliant than French, lends itself to play of
thought which our positivism (pardon the use of the expression)
rejects. So it seemed to me that a volume of sonnets would be something
quite new. Victor Hugo has appropriated the old, Canalis writes lighter
verse, Beranger has monopolized songs, Casimir Delavigne has taken
tragedy, and Lamartine the poetry of meditation."

"Are you a 'Classic' or a 'Romantic'?" inquired Lousteau.

Lucien's
astonishment betrayed such complete ignorance of the state of affairs
in the republic of letters, that Lousteau thought it necessary to
enlighten him.

"You have come up in the middle of a pitched
battle, my dear fellow; you must make your decision at once. Literature
is divided, in the first place, into several zones, but our great men
are ranged in two hostile camps. The Royalists are 'Romantics,' the
Liberals are 'Classics.' The divergence of taste in matters literary
and divergence of political opinion coincide; and the result is a war
with weapons of every sort, double-edged witticisms, subtle calumnies
and nicknames _a outrance_, between the rising and the waning glory,
and ink is shed in torrents. The odd part of it is that the
Royalist-Romantics are all for liberty in literature, and for repealing
laws and conventions; while the Liberal-Classics are for maintaining
the unities, the Alexandrine, and the classical theme. So opinions in
politics on either side are directly at variance with literary taste.
If you are eclectic, you will have no one for you. Which side do you
take?"

"Which is the winning side?"

"The Liberal
newspapers have far more subscribers than the Royalist and Ministerial
journals; still, though Canalis is for Church and King, and patronized
by the Court and the clergy, he reaches other readers.--Pshaw! sonnets
date back to an epoch before Boileau's time," said Etienne, seeing
Lucien's dismay at the prospect of choosing between two banners. "Be a
Romantic. The Romantics are young men, and the Classics are pedants;
the Romantics will gain the day."

The word "pedant" was the latest epithet taken up by Romantic
journalism to heap confusion on the Classical faction.

Lucien began to read, choosing first of all the title-sonnets.

EASTER DAISIES.

The daisies in the meadows, not in vain, In red and white and gold
before our eyes, Have written an idyll for man's sympathies, And set
his heart's desire in language plain.

Gold stamens set in
silver filigrane Reveal the treasures which we idolize; And all the
cost of struggle for the prize Is symboled by a secret blood-red stain.

Was it because your petals once uncurled When Jesus rose upon a fairer
world, And from wings shaken for a heav'nward flight Shed grace, that
still as autumn reappears You bloom again to tell of dead delight, To
bring us back the flower of twenty years?

Lucien felt piqued by
Lousteau's complete indifference during the reading of the sonnet; he
was unfamiliar as yet with the disconcerting impassibility of the
professional critic, wearied by much reading of poetry, prose, and
plays. Lucien was accustomed to applause. He choked down his
disappointment and read another, a favorite with Mme. de Bargeton and
with some of his friends in the Rue des Quatre-Vents.

"This one, perhaps, will draw a word from him," he thought.

THE MARGUERITE.

I am the Marguerite, fair and tall I grew In velvet meadows, 'mid the
flowers a star. They sought me for my beauty near and far; My dawn, I
thought, should be for ever new. But now an all unwished-for gift I
rue, A fatal ray of knowledge shed to mar My radiant star-crown grown
oracular, For I must speak and give an answer true. An end of silence
and of quiet days, The Lover with two words my counsel prays; And when
my secret from my heart is reft, When all my silver petals scattered
lie, I am the only flower neglected left, Cast down and trodden under
foot to die.

At the end, the poet looked up at his Aristarchus. Etienne Lousteau was
gazing at the trees in the Pepiniere.

"Well?" asked Lucien.

"Well, my dear fellow, go on! I am listening to you, am I not? That
fact in itself is as good as praise in Paris."

"Have you had enough?" Lucien asked.

"Go on," the other answered abruptly enough.

Lucien
proceeded to read the following sonnet, but his heart was dead within
him; Lousteau's inscrutable composure froze his utterance. If he had
come a little further upon the road, he would have known that between
writer and writer silence or abrupt speech, under such circumstances,
is a betrayal of jealousy, and outspoken admiration means a sense of
relief over the discovery that the work is not above the average after
all.

THE CAMELLIA.

In Nature's book, if
rightly understood, The rose means love, and red for beauty glows; A
pure, sweet spirit in the violet blows, And bright the lily gleams in
lowlihood.

But this strange bloom, by sun and wind unwooed,
Seems to expand and blossom 'mid the snows, A lily sceptreless, a
scentless rose, For dainty listlessness of maidenhood.

Yet at
the opera house the petals trace For modesty a fitting aureole; An
alabaster wreath to lay, methought, In dusky hair o'er some fair
woman's face Which kindles ev'n such love within the soul As sculptured
marble forms by Phidias wrought.

"What do you think of my poor sonnets?" Lucien asked, coming straight
to the point.

"Do you want the truth?"

"I
am young enough to like the truth, and so anxious to succeed that I can
hear it without taking offence, but not without despair," replied
Lucien.

"Well, my dear fellow, the first sonnet, from its
involved style, was evidently written at Angouleme; it gave you so much
trouble, no doubt, that you cannot give it up. The second and third
smack of Paris already; but read us one more sonnet," he added, with a
gesture that seemed charming to the provincial.

Encouraged by
the request, Lucien read with more confidence, choosing a sonnet which
d'Arthez and Bridau liked best, perhaps on account of its color.

THE TULIP.

I am the Tulip from Batavia's shore; The thrifty Fleming for my beauty
rare Pays a king's ransom, when that I am fair, And tall, and straight,
and pure my petal's core.

And, like some Yolande of the days of
yore, My long and amply folded skirts I wear, O'er-painted with the
blazon that I bear --Gules, a fess azure; purpure, fretty, or.

The fingers of the Gardener divine Have woven for me my vesture fair
and fine, Of threads of sunlight and of purple stain; No flower so
glorious in the garden bed, But Nature, woe is me, no fragrance shed
Within my cup of Orient porcelain.

"Well?" asked Lucien after a pause, immeasurably long, as it seemed to
him.

"My
dear fellow," Etienne said, gravely surveying the tips of Lucien's
boots (he had brought the pair from Angouleme, and was wearing them
out). "My dear fellow, I strongly recommend you to put your ink on your
boots to save blacking, and to take your pens for toothpicks, so that
when you come away from Flicoteaux's you can swagger along this
picturesque alley looking as if you had dined. Get a situation of any
sort or description. Run errands for a bailiff if you have the heart,
be a shopman if your back is strong enough, enlist if you happen to
have a taste for military music. You have the stuff of three poets in
you; but before you can reach your public, you will have time to die of
starvation six times over, if you intend to live on the proceeds of
your poetry, that is. And from your too unsophisticated discourse, it
would seem to be your intention to coin money out of your inkstand.

"I
say nothing as to your verses; they are a good deal better than all the
poetical wares that are cumbering the ground in booksellers' backshops
just now. Elegant 'nightingales' of that sort cost a little more than
the others, because they are printed on hand-made paper, but they
nearly all of them come down at last to the banks of the Seine. You may
study their range of notes there any day if you care to make an
instructive pilgrimage along the Quais from old Jerome's stall by the
Pont Notre Dame to the Pont Royal. You will find them all there --all
the _Essays in Verse_, the _Inspirations_, the lofty flights, the
hymns, and songs, and ballads, and odes; all the nestfuls hatched
during the last seven years, in fact. There lie their muses, thick with
dust, bespattered by every passing cab, at the mercy of every profane
hand that turns them over to look at the vignette on the title-page.

"You
know nobody; you have access to no newspaper, so your _Marguerites_
will remain demurely folded as you hold them now. They will never open
out to the sun of publicity in fair fields with broad margins enameled
with the florets which Dauriat the illustrious, the king of the Wooden
Galleries, scatters with a lavish hand for poets known to fame. I came
to Paris as you came, poor boy, with a plentiful stock of illusions,
impelled by irrepressible longings for glory--and I found the realities
of the craft, the practical difficulties of the trade, the hard facts
of poverty. In my enthusiasm (it is kept well under control now), my
first ebullition of youthful spirits, I did not see the social
machinery at work; so I had to learn to see it by bumping against the
wheels and bruising myself against the shafts, and chains. Now you are
about to learn, as I learned, that between you and all these fair
dreamed-of things lies the strife of men, and passions, and necessities.

"Willy-nilly,
you must take part in a terrible battle; book against book, man against
man, party against party; make war you must, and that systematically,
or you will be abandoned by your own party. And they are mean contests;
struggles which leave you disenchanted, and wearied, and depraved, and
all in pure waste; for it often happens that you put forth all your
strength to win laurels for a man whom you despise, and maintain, in
spite of yourself, that some second-rate writer is a genius.

"There
is a world behind the scenes in the theatre of literature. The public
in front sees unexpected or well-deserved success, and applauds; the
public does _not_ see the preparations, ugly as they always are, the
painted supers, the _claqueurs_ hired to applaud, the stage carpenters,
and all that lies behind the scenes. You are still among the audience.
Abdicate, there is still time, before you set your foot on the lowest
step of the throne for which so many ambitious spirits are contending,
and do not sell your honor, as I do, for a livelihood." Etienne's eyes
filled with tears as he spoke.

"Do you know how I make a
living?" he continued passionately. "The little stock of money they
gave me at home was soon eaten up. A piece of mine was accepted at the
Theatre-Francais just as I came to an end of it. At the
Theatre-Francais the influence of a first gentleman of the bedchamber,
or of a prince of the blood, would not be enough to secure a turn of
favor; the actors only make concessions to those who threaten their
self-love. If it is in your power to spread a report that the _jeune
premier_ has the asthma, the leading lady a fistula where you please,
and the soubrette has foul breath, then your piece would be played
to-morrow. I do not know whether in two years' time, I who speak to you
now, shall be in a position to exercise such power. You need so many to
back you. And where and how am I to gain my bread meanwhile?

"I
tried lots of things; I wrote a novel, anonymously; old Doguereau gave
me two hundred francs for it, and he did not make very much out of it
himself. Then it grew plain to me that journalism alone could give me a
living. The next thing was to find my way into those shops. I will not
tell you all the advances I made, nor how often I begged in vain. I
will say nothing of the six months I spent as extra hand on a paper,
and was told that I scared subscribers away, when as a fact I attracted
them. Pass over the insults I put up with. At this moment I am doing
the plays at the Boulevard theatres, almost _gratis_, for a paper
belonging to Finot, that stout young fellow who breakfasts two or three
times a month, even now, at the Cafe Voltaire (but you don't go there).
I live by selling tickets that managers give me to bribe a good word in
the paper, and reviewers' copies of books. In short, Finot once
satisfied, I am allowed to write for and against various commercial
articles, and I traffic in tribute paid in kind by various tradesmen. A
facetious notice of a Carminative Toilet Lotion, _Pate des Sultanes_,
Cephalic Oil, or Brazilian Mixture brings me in twenty or thirty francs.

"I
am obliged to dun the publishers when they don't send in a sufficient
number of reviewers' copies; Finot, as editor, appropriates two and
sells them, and I must have two to sell. If a book of capital
importance comes out, and the publisher is stingy with copies, his life
is made a burden to him. The craft is vile, but I live by it, and so do
scores of others. Do not imagine that things are any better in public
life. There is corruption everywhere in both regions; every man is
corrupt or corrupts others. If there is any publishing enterprise
somewhat larger than usual afoot, the trade will pay me something to
buy neutrality. The amount of my income varies, therefore, directly
with the prospectuses. When prospectuses break out like a rash, money
pours into my pockets; I stand treat all round. When trade is dull, I
dine at Flicoteaux's.

"Actresses will pay you likewise for
praise, but the wiser among them pay for criticism. To be passed over
in silence is what they dread the most; and the very best thing of all,
from their point of view, is criticism which draws down a reply; it is
far more effectual than bald praise, forgotten as soon as read, and it
costs more in consequence. Celebrity, my dear fellow, is based upon
controversy. I am a hired bravo; I ply my trade among ideas and
reputations, commercial, literary, and dramatic; I make some fifty
crowns a month; I can sell a novel for five hundred francs; and I am
beginning to be looked upon as a man to be feared. Some day, instead of
living with Florine at the expense of a druggist who gives himself the
airs of a lord, I shall be in a house of my own; I shall be on the
staff of a leading newspaper, I shall have a _feuilleton_; and on that
day, my dear fellow, Florine will become a great actress. As for me, I
am not sure what I shall be when that time comes, a minister or an
honest man--all things are still possible."

He raised his
humiliated head, and looked out at the green leaves, with an expression
of despairing self-condemnation dreadful to see.

"And I had a
great tragedy accepted!" he went on. "And among my papers there is a
poem, which will die. And I was a good fellow, and my heart was clean!
I used to dream lofty dreams of love for great ladies, queens in the
great world; and--my mistress is an actress at the Panorama-Dramatique.
And lastly, if a bookseller declines to send a copy of a book to my
paper, I will run down work which is good, as I know."

Lucien
was moved to tears, and he grasped Etienne's hand in his. The
journalist rose to his feet, and the pair went up and down the broad
Avenue de l'Observatoire, as if their lungs craved ampler breathing
space.

"Outside the world of letters," Etienne Lousteau
continued, "not a single creature suspects that every one who succeeds
in that world --who has a certain vogue, that is to say, or comes into
fashion, or gains reputation, or renown, or fame, or favor with the
public (for by these names we know the rungs of the ladder by which we
climb to the higher heights above and beyond them),--every one who
comes even thus far is the hero of a dreadful Odyssey. Brilliant
portents rise above the mental horizon through a combination of a
thousand accidents; conditions change so swiftly that no two men have
been known to reach success by the same road. Canalis and Nathan are
two dissimilar cases; things never fall out in the same way twice.
There is d'Arthez, who knocks himself to pieces with work--he will make
a famous name by some other chance.

"This so much desired
reputation is nearly always crowned prostitution. Yes; the poorest kind
of literature is the hapless creature freezing at the street corner;
second-rate literature is the kept-mistress picked out of the brothels
of journalism, and I am her bully; lastly, there is lucky literature,
the flaunting, insolent courtesan who has a house of her own and pays
taxes, who receives great lords, treating or ill-treating them as she
pleases, who has liveried servants and a carriage, and can afford to
keep greedy creditors waiting. Ah! and for yet others, for me not so
very long ago, for you to-day--she is a white-robed angel with
many-colored wings, bearing a green palm branch in the one hand, and in
the other a flaming sword. An angel, something akin to the mythological
abstraction which lives at the bottom of a well, and to the poor and
honest girl who lives a life of exile in the outskirts of the great
city, earning every penny with a noble fortitude and in the full light
of virtue, returning to heaven inviolate of body and soul; unless,
indeed, she comes to lie at the last, soiled, despoiled, polluted, and
forgotten, on a pauper's bier. As for the men whose brains are
encompassed with bronze, whose hearts are still warm under the snows of
experience, they are found but seldom in the country that lies at our
feet," he added, pointing to the great city seething in the late
afternoon light.

A vision of d'Arthez and his friends flashed
upon Lucien's sight, and made appeal to him for a moment; but
Lousteau's appalling lamentation carried him away.

"They are
very few and far between in that great fermenting vat; rare as love in
love-making, rare as fortunes honestly made in business, rare as the
journalist whose hands are clean. The experience of the first man who
told me all that I am telling you was thrown away upon me, and mine no
doubt will be wasted upon you. It is always the same old story year
after year; the same eager rush to Paris from the provinces; the same,
not to say a growing, number of beardless, ambitious boys, who advance,
head erect, and the heart that Princess Tourandocte of the _Mille et un
Jours_--each one of them fain to be her Prince Calaf. But never a one
of them reads the riddle. One by one they drop, some into the trench
where failures lie, some into the mire of journalism, some again into
the quagmires of the book-trade.

"They pick up a living, these
beggars, what with biographical notices, penny-a-lining, and scraps of
news for the papers. They become booksellers' hacks for the
clear-headed dealers in printed paper, who would sooner take the
rubbish that goes off in a fortnight than a masterpiece which requires
time to sell. The life is crushed out of the grubs before they reach
the butterfly stage. They live by shame and dishonor. They are ready to
write down a rising genius or to praise him to the skies at a word from
the pasha of the _Constitutionnel_, the _Quotidienne_, or the _Debats_,
at a sign from a publisher, at the request of a jealous comrade, or (as
not seldom happens) simply for a dinner. Some surmount the obstacles,
and these forget the misery of their early days. I, who am telling you
this, have been putting the best that is in me into newspaper articles
for six months past for a blackguard who gives them out as his own and
has secured a _feuilleton_ in another paper on the strength of them. He
has not taken me on as his collaborator, he has not give me so much as
a five-franc piece, but I hold out a hand to grasp his when we meet; I
cannot help myself."

"And why?" Lucien, asked, indignantly.

"I
may want to put a dozen lines into his _feuilleton_ some day," Lousteau
answered coolly. "In short, my dear fellow, in literature you will not
make money by hard work, that is not the secret of success; the point
is to exploit the work of somebody else. A newspaper proprietor is a
contractor, we are the bricklayers. The more mediocre the man, the
better his chance of getting on among mediocrities; he can play the
toad-eater, put up with any treatment, and flatter all the little base
passions of the sultans of literature. There is Hector Merlin, who came
from Limoges a short time ago; he is writing political articles already
for a Right Centre daily, and he is at work on our little paper as
well. I have seen an editor drop his hat and Merlin pick it up. The
fellow was careful never to give offence, and slipped into the thick of
the fight between rival ambitions. I am sorry for you. It is as if I
saw in you the self that I used to be, and sure am I that in one or two
years' time you will be what I am now.--You will think that there is
some lurking jealousy or personal motive in this bitter counsel, but it
is prompted by the despair of a damned soul that can never leave
hell.--No one ventures to utter such things as these. You hear the
groans of anguish from a man wounded to the heart, crying like a second
Job from the ashes, 'Behold my sores!'"

"But whether I fight upon this field or elsewhere, fight I must," said
Lucien.

"Then,
be sure of this," returned Lousteau, "if you have anything in you, the
war will know no truce, the best chance of success lies in an empty
head. The austerity of your conscience, clear as yet, will relax when
you see that a man holds your future in his two hands, when a word from
such a man means life to you, and he will not say that word. For,
believe me, the most brutal bookseller in the trade is not so insolent,
so hard-hearted to a newcomer as the celebrity of the day. The
bookseller sees a possible loss of money, while the writer of books
dreads a possible rival; the first shows you the door, the second
crushes the life out of you. To do really good work, my boy, means that
you will draw out the energy, sap, and tenderness of your nature at
every dip of the pen in the ink, to set it forth for the world in
passion and sentiment and phrases. Yes; instead of acting, you will
write; you will sing songs instead of fighting; you will love and hate
and live in your books; and then, after all, when you shall have
reserved your riches for your style, your gold and purple for your
characters, and you yourself are walking the streets of Paris in rags,
rejoicing in that, rivaling the State Register, you have authorized the
existence of beings styled Adolphe, Corinne or Clarissa, Rene or Manon;
when you shall have spoiled your life and your digestion to give life
to that creation, then you shall see it slandered, betrayed, sold,
swept away into the back waters of oblivion by journalists, and buried
out of sight by your best friends. How can you afford to wait until the
day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead--how?
when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the _pianto_ of unbelief;
_Obermann_ is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers'
warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale,' ironically so called, from the
very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows? Try, to begin
with, to find somebody bold enough to print the _Marguerites_; not to
pay for them, but simply to print them; and you will see some queer
things."

The fierce tirade, delivered in every tone of the
passionate feeling which it expressed, fell upon Lucien's spirit like
an avalanche, and left a sense of glacial cold. For one moment he stood
silent; then, as he felt the terrible stimulating charm of difficulty
beginning to work upon him, his courage blazed up. He grasped
Lousteau's hand.

"I will triumph!" he cried aloud.

"Good!"
said the other, "one more Christian given over to the wild beasts in
the arena.--There is a first-night performance at the
Panorama-Dramatique, my dear fellow; it doesn't begin till eight, so
you can change your coat, come properly dressed in fact, and call for
me. I am living on the fourth floor above the Cafe Servel, Rue de la
Harpe. We will go to Dauriat's first of all. You still mean to go on,
do you not? Very well, I will introduce you to one of the kings of the
trade to-night, and to one or two journalists. We will sup with my
mistress and several friends after the play, for you cannot count that
dinner as a meal. Finot will be there, editor and proprietor of my
paper. As Minette says in the Vaudeville (do you remember?), 'Time is a
great lean creature.' Well, for the like of us, Chance is a great lean
creature, and must be tempted."

"I shall remember this day as long as I live," said Lucien.

"Bring your manuscript with you, and be careful of your dress, not on
Florine's account, but for the booksellers' benefit."

The
comrade's good-nature, following upon the poet's passionate outcry, as
he described the war of letters, moved Lucien quite as deeply as
d'Arthez's grave and earnest words on a former occasion. The prospect
of entering at once upon the strife with men warmed him. In his youth
and inexperience he had no suspicion how real were the moral evils
denounced by the journalist. Nor did he know that he was standing at
the parting of two distinct ways, between two systems, represented by
the brotherhood upon one hand, and journalism upon the other. The first
way was long, honorable, and sure; the second beset with hidden
dangers, a perilous path, among muddy channels where conscience is
inevitably bespattered. The bent of Lucien's character determined for
the shorter way, and the apparently pleasanter way, and to snatch at
the quickest and promptest means. At this moment he saw no difference
between d'Arthez's noble friendship and Lousteau's easy comaraderie;
his inconstant mind discerned a new weapon in journalism; he felt that
he could wield it, so he wished to take it.

He was dazzled by
the offers of this new friend, who had struck a hand in his in an easy
way, which charmed Lucien. How should he know that while every man in
the army of the press needs friends, every leader needs men. Lousteau,
seeing that Lucien was resolute, enlisted him as a recruit, and hoped
to attach him to himself. The relative positions of the two were
similar--one hoped to become a corporal, the other to enter the ranks.

Lucien
went back gaily to his lodgings. He was as careful over his toilet as
on that former unlucky occasion when he occupied the Marquise
d'Espard's box; but he had learned by this time how to wear his clothes
with a better grace. They looked as though they belonged to him. He
wore his best tightly-fitting, light-colored trousers, and a
dress-coat. His boots, a very elegant pair adorned with tassels, had
cost him forty francs. His thick, fine, golden hair was scented and
crimped into bright, rippling curls. Self-confidence and belief in his
future lighted up his forehead. He paid careful attention to his almost
feminine hands, the filbert nails were a spotless pink, and the white
contours of his chin were dazzling by contrast with a black satin
stock. Never did a more beautiful youth come down from the hills of the
Latin Quarter.

Glorious as a Greek god, Lucien took a cab, and
reached the Cafe Servel at a quarter to seven. There the portress gave
him some tolerably complicated directions for the ascent of four pairs
of stairs. Provided with these instructions, he discovered, not without
difficulty, an open door at the end of a long, dark passage, and in
another moment made the acquaintance of the traditional room of the
Latin Quarter.

A young man's poverty follows him wherever he
goes--into the Rue de la Harpe as into the Rue de Cluny, into
d'Arthez's room, into Chrestien's lodging; yet everywhere no less the
poverty has its own peculiar characteristics, due to the idiosyncrasies
of the sufferer. Poverty in this case wore a sinister look.

A
shabby, cheap carpet lay in wrinkles at the foot of a curtainless
walnut-wood bedstead; dingy curtains, begrimed with cigar smoke and
fumes from a smoky chimney, hung in the windows; a Carcel lamp,
Florine's gift, on the chimney-piece, had so far escaped the
pawnbroker. Add a forlorn-looking chest of drawers, and a table
littered with papers and disheveled quill pens, and the list of
furniture was almost complete. All the books had evidently arrived in
the course of the last twenty-four hours; and there was not a single
object of any value in the room. In one corner you beheld a collection
of crushed and flattened cigars, coiled pocket-handkerchiefs, shirts
which had been turned to do double duty, and cravats that had reached a
third edition; while a sordid array of old boots stood gaping in
another angle of the room among aged socks worn into lace.

The
room, in short, was a journalist's bivouac, filled with odds and ends
of no value, and the most curiously bare apartment imaginable. A
scarlet tinder-box glowed among a pile of books on the nightstand. A
brace of pistols, a box of cigars, and a stray razor lay upon the
mantel-shelf; a pair of foils, crossed under a wire mask, hung against
a panel. Three chairs and a couple of armchairs, scarcely fit for the
shabbiest lodging-house in the street, completed the inventory.

The
dirty, cheerless room told a tale of a restless life and a want of
self-respect; some one came hither to sleep and work at high pressure,
staying no longer than he could help, longing, while he remained, to be
out and away. What a difference between this cynical disorder and
d'Arthez's neat and self-respecting poverty! A warning came with the
thought of d'Arthez; but Lucien would not heed it, for Etienne made a
joking remark to cover the nakedness of a reckless life.

"This
is my kennel; I appear in state in the Rue de Bondy, in the new
apartments which our druggist has taken for Florine; we hold the
house-warming this evening."

Etienne Lousteau wore black
trousers and beautifully-varnished boots; his coat was buttoned up to
his chin; he probably meant to change his linen at Florine's house, for
his shirt collar was hidden by a velvet stock. He was trying to
renovate his hat by an application of the brush.

"Let us go," said Lucien.

"Not
yet. I am waiting for a bookseller to bring me some money; I have not a
farthing; there will be play, perhaps, and in any case I must have
gloves."

As he spoke, the two new friends heard a man's step in the passage
outside.

"There
he is," said Lousteau. "Now you will see, my dear fellow, the shape
that Providence takes when he manifests himself to poets. You are going
to behold Dauriat, the fashionable bookseller of the Quai des
Augustins, the pawnbroker, the marine store dealer of the trade, the
Norman ex-greengrocer.--Come along, old Tartar!" shouted Lousteau.

"Here am I," said a voice like a cracked bell.

"Brought the money with you?"

"Money? There is no money now in the trade," retorted the other, a
young man who eyed Lucien curiously.

"_Imprimis_, you owe me fifty francs," Lousteau continued.

"There
are two copies of _Travels in Egypt_ here, a marvel, so they say,
swarming with woodcuts, sure to sell. Finot has been paid for two
reviews that I am to write for him. _Item_ two works, just out, by
Victor Ducange, a novelist highly thought of in the Marais. _Item_ a
couple of copies of a second work by Paul de Kock, a beginner in the
same style. _Item_ two copies of _Yseult of Dole_, a charming
provincial work. Total, one hundred francs, my little Barbet."

Barbet made a close survey of edges and binding.

"Oh!
they are in perfect condition," cried Lousteau. "The _Travels_ are
uncut, so is the Paul de Kock, so is the Ducange, so is that other
thing on the chimney-piece, _Considerations on Symbolism_. I will throw
that in; myths weary me to that degree that I will let you have the
thing to spare myself the sight of the swarms of mites coming out of
it."

"But," asked Lucien, "how are you going to write your reviews?"

Barbet, in profound astonishment, stared at Lucien; then he looked at
Etienne and chuckled.

"One can see that the gentleman has not the misfortune to be a literary
man," said he.

"No,
Barbet--no. He is a poet, a great poet; he is going to cut out Canalis,
and Beranger, and Delavigne. He will go a long way if he does not throw
himself into the river, and even so he will get as far as the drag-nets
at Saint-Cloud."

"If I had any advice to give the gentleman,"
remarked Barbet, "it would be to give up poetry and take to prose.
Poetry is not wanted on the Quais just now."

Barbet's shabby
overcoat was fastened by a single button; his collar was greasy; he
kept his hat on his head as he spoke; he wore low shoes, an open
waistcoat gave glimpses of a homely shirt of coarse linen. Good-nature
was not wanting in the round countenance, with its two slits of
covetous eyes; but there was likewise the vague uneasiness habitual to
those who have money to spend and hear constant applications for it.
Yet, to all appearance, he was plain-dealing and easy-natured, his
business shrewdness was so well wadded round with fat. He had been an
assistant until he took a wretched little shop on the Quai des
Augustins two years since, and issued thence on his rounds among
journalists, authors, and printers, buying up free copies cheaply,
making in such ways some ten or twenty francs daily. Now, he had money
saved; he knew instinctively where every man was pressed; he had a keen
eye for business. If an author was in difficulties, he would discount a
bill given by a publisher at fifteen or twenty per cent; then the next
day he would go to the publisher, haggle over the price of some work in
demand, and pay him with his own bills instead of cash. Barbet was
something of a scholar; he had had just enough education to make him
careful to steer clear of modern poetry and modern romances. He had a
liking for small speculations, for books of a popular kind which might
be bought outright for a thousand francs and exploited at pleasure,
such as the _Child's History of France_, _Book-keeping in Twenty
Lessons_, and _Botany for Young Ladies_. Two or three times already he
had allowed a good book to slip through his fingers; the authors had
come and gone a score of times while he hesitated, and could not make
up his mind to buy the manuscript. When reproached for his
pusillanimity, he was wont to produce the account of a notorious trial
taken from the newspapers; it cost him nothing, and had brought him in
two or three thousand francs.

Barbet was the type of bookseller
that goes in fear and trembling; lives on bread and walnuts; rarely
puts his name to a bill; filches little profits on invoices; makes
deductions, and hawks his books about himself; heaven only knows where
they go, but he sells them somehow, and gets paid for them. Barbet was
the terror of printers, who could not tell what to make of him; he paid
cash and took off the discount; he nibbled at their invoices whenever
he thought they were pressed for money; and when he had fleeced a man
once, he never went back to him--he feared to be caught in his turn.

"Well," said Lousteau, "shall we go on with our business?"

"Eh!
my boy," returned Barbet in a familiar tone; "I have six thousand
volumes of stock on hand at my place, and paper is not gold, as the old
bookseller said. Trade is dull."

"If you went into his shop, my
dear Lucien," said Etienne, turning to his friend, "you would see an
oak counter from some bankrupt wine merchant's sale, and a tallow dip,
never snuffed for fear it should burn too quickly, making darkness
visible. By that anomalous light you descry rows of empty shelves with
some difficulty. An urchin in a blue blouse mounts guard over the
emptiness, and blows his fingers, and shuffles his feet, and slaps his
chest, like a cabman on the box. Just look about you! there are no more
books there than I have here. Nobody could guess what kind of shop he
keeps."

"Here is a bill at three months for a hundred francs,"
said Barbet, and he could not help smiling as he drew it out of his
pocket; "I will take your old books off your hands. I can't pay cash
any longer, you see; sales are too slow. I thought that you would be
wanting me; I had not a penny, and I made a bill simply to oblige you,
for I am not fond of giving my signature."

"So you want my thanks and esteem into the bargain, do you?"

"Bills are not met with sentiment," responded Barbet; "but I will
accept your esteem, all the same."

"But
I want gloves, and the perfumers will be base enough to decline your
paper," said Lousteau. "Stop, there is a superb engraving in the top
drawer of the chest there, worth eighty francs, proof before letters
and after letterpress, for I have written a pretty droll article upon
it. There was something to lay hold of in _Hippocrates refusing the
Presents of Artaxerxes_. A fine engraving, eh? Just the thing to suit
all the doctors, who are refusing the extravagant gifts of Parisian
satraps. You will find two or three dozen novels underneath it. Come,
now, take the lot and give me forty francs."

"_Forty francs_!"
exclaimed the bookseller, emitting a cry like the squall of a
frightened fowl. "Twenty at the very most! And then I may never see the
money again," he added.

"Where are your twenty francs?" asked Lousteau.

"My
word, I don't know that I have them," said Barbet, fumbling in his
pockets. "Here they are. You are plundering me; you have an ascendency
over me----"

"Come, let us be off," said Lousteau, and taking up Lucien's
manuscript, he drew a line upon it in ink under the string.

"Have you anything else?" asked Barbet.

"Nothing,
you young Shylock. I am going to put you in the way of a bit of very
good business," Etienne continued ("in which you shall lose a thousand
crowns, to teach you to rob me in this fashion"), he added for Lucien's
ear.

"But how about your reviews?" said Lucien, as they rolled away to the
Palais Royal.

"Pooh!
you do not know how reviews are knocked off. As for the _Travels in
Egypt_, I looked into the book here and there (without cutting the
pages), and I found eleven slips in grammar. I shall say that the
writer may have mastered the dicky-bird language on the flints that
they call 'obelisks' out there in Egypt, but he cannot write in his
own, as I will prove to him in a column and a half. I shall say that
instead of giving us the natural history and archaeology, he ought to
have interested himself in the future of Egypt, in the progress of
civilization, and the best method of strengthening the bond between
Egypt and France. France has won and lost Egypt, but she may yet attach
the country to her interests by gaining a moral ascendency over it.
Then some patriotic penny-a-lining, interlarded with diatribes on
Marseilles, the Levant and our trade."

"But suppose that he had taken that view, what would you do?"

"Oh
well, I should say that instead of boring us with politics, he should
have written about art, and described the picturesque aspects of the
country and the local color. Then the critic bewails himself. Politics
are intruded everywhere; we are weary of politics--politics on all
sides. I should regret those charming books of travel that dwelt upon
the difficulties of navigation, the fascination of steering between two
rocks, the delights of crossing the line, and all the things that those
who never will travel ought to know. Mingle this approval with scoffing
at the travelers who hail the appearance of a bird or a flying-fish as
a great event, who dilate upon fishing, and make transcripts from the
log. Where, you ask, is that perfectly unintelligible scientific
information, fascinating, like all that is profound, mysterious, and
incomprehensible. The reader laughs, that is all that he wants. As for
novels, Florine is the greatest novel reader alive; she gives me a
synopsis, and I take her opinion and put a review together. When a
novelist bores her with 'author's stuff,' as she calls it, I treat the
work respectfully, and ask the publisher for another copy, which he
sends forthwith, delighted to have a favorable review."

"Goodness!
and what of criticism, the critic's sacred office?" cried Lucien,
remembering the ideas instilled into him by the brotherhood.

"My
dear fellow," said Lousteau, "criticism is a kind of brush which must
not be used upon flimsy stuff, or it carries it all away with it. That
is enough of the craft, now listen! Do you see that mark?" he
continued, pointing to the manuscript of the _Marguerites_. "I have put
ink on the string and paper. If Dauriat reads your manuscript, he
certainly could not tie the string and leave it just as it was before.
So your book is sealed, so to speak. This is not useless to you for the
experiment that you propose to make. And another thing: please to
observe that you are not arriving quite alone and without a sponsor in
the place, like the youngsters who make the round of half-a-score of
publishers before they find one that will offer them a chair."

Lucien's
experience confirmed the truth of this particular. Lousteau paid the
cabman, giving him three francs--a piece of prodigality following upon
such impecuniosity astonishing Lucien more than a little. Then the two
friends entered the Wooden Galleries, where fashionable literature, as
it is called, used to reign in state.

PART II

The
Wooden Galleries of the Palais Royal used to be one of the most famous
sights of Paris. Some description of the squalid bazar will not be out
of place; for there are few men of forty who will not take an interest
in recollections of a state of things which will seem incredible to a
younger generation.

The great dreary, spacious Galerie
d'Orleans, that flowerless hothouse, as yet was not; the space upon
which it now stands was covered with booths; or, to be more precise,
with small, wooden dens, pervious to the weather, and dimly illuminated
on the side of the court and the garden by borrowed lights styled
windows by courtesy, but more like the filthiest arrangements for
obscuring daylight to be found in little wineshops in the suburbs.

The
Galleries, parallel passages about twelve feet in height, were formed
by a triple row of shops. The centre row, giving back and front upon
the Galleries, was filled with the fetid atmosphere of the place, and
derived a dubious daylight through the invariably dirty windows of the
roof; but so thronged were these hives, that rents were excessively
high, and as much as a thousand crowns was paid for a space scarce six
feet by eight. The outer rows gave respectively upon the garden and the
court, and were covered on that side by a slight trellis-work painted
green, to protect the crazy plastered walls from continual friction
with the passers-by. In a few square feet of earth at the back of the
shops, strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid
the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a
rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of
rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept,
ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue
flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed
unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You
discovered a knot of ribbon adorning a green tuft; the dahlia admired
afar proved on a nearer view to be a satin rosette.

The Palais
seen from the court or from the garden was a fantastic sight, a
grotesque combination of walls of plaster patchwork which had once been
whitewashed, of blistered paint, heterogeneous placards, and all the
most unaccountable freaks of Parisian squalor; the green trellises were
prodigiously the dingier for constant contact with a Parisian public.
So, upon either side, the fetid, disreputable approaches might have
been there for the express purpose of warning away fastidious people;
but fastidious folk no more recoiled before these horrors than the
prince in the fairy stories turns tail at sight of the dragon or of the
other obstacles put between him and the princess by the wicked fairy.

There
was a passage through the centre of the Galleries then as now; and, as
at the present day, you entered them through the two peristyles begun
before the Revolution, and left unfinished for lack of funds; but in
place of the handsome modern arcade leading to the Theatre-Francais,
you passed along a narrow, disproportionately lofty passage, so
ill-roofed that the rain came through on wet days. All the roofs of the
hovels indeed were in very bad repair, and covered here and again with
a double thickness of tarpaulin. A famous silk mercer once brought an
action against the Orleans family for damages done in the course of a
night to his stock of shawls and stuffs, and gained the day and a
considerable sum. It was in this last-named passage, called "The Glass
Gallery" to distinguish it from the Wooden Galleries, that Chevet laid
the foundations of his fortunes.

Here, in the Palais, you trod
the natural soil of Paris, augmented by importations brought in upon
the boots of foot passengers; here, at all seasons, you stumbled among
hills and hollows of dried mud swept daily by the shopman's besom, and
only after some practice could you walk at your ease. The treacherous
mud-heaps, the window-panes incrusted with deposits of dust and rain,
the mean-looking hovels covered with ragged placards, the grimy
unfinished walls, the general air of a compromise between a gypsy camp,
the booths of a country fair, and the temporary structures that we in
Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the
grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the
seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in
this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk,
an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of
1789 and the Revolution of 1830.

For twenty years the Bourse
stood just opposite, on the ground floor of the Palais. Public opinion
was manufactured, and reputations made and ruined here, just as
political and financial jobs were arranged. People made appointments to
meet in the Galleries before or after 'Change; on showery days the
Palais Royal was often crowded with weather-bound capitalists and men
of business. The structure which had grown up, no one knew how, about
this point was strangely resonant, laughter was multiplied; if two men
quarreled, the whole place rang from one end to the other with the
dispute. In the daytime milliners and booksellers enjoyed a monopoly of
the place; towards nightfall it was filled with women of the town. Here
dwelt poetry, politics, and prose, new books and classics, the glories
of ancient and modern literature side by side with political intrigue
and the tricks of the bookseller's trade. Here all the very latest and
newest literature were sold to a public which resolutely decline to buy
elsewhere. Sometimes several thousand copies of such and such a
pamphlet by Paul-Louis Courier would be sold in a single evening; and
people crowded thither to buy _Les aventures de la fille d'un
Roi_--that first shot fired by the Orleanists at The Charter
promulgated by Louis XVIII.

When Lucien made his first
appearance in the Wooden Galleries, some few of the shops boasted
proper fronts and handsome windows, but these in every case looked upon
the court or the garden. As for the centre row, until the day when the
whole strange colony perished under the hammer of Fontaine the
architect, every shop was open back and front like a booth in a country
fair, so that from within you could look out upon either side through
gaps among the goods displayed or through the glass doors. As it was
obviously impossible to kindle a fire, the tradesmen were fain to use
charcoal chafing-dishes, and formed a sort of brigade for the
prevention of fires among themselves; and, indeed, a little
carelessness might have set the whole quarter blazing in fifteen
minutes, for the plank-built republic, dried by the heat of the sun,
and haunted by too inflammable human material, was bedizened with
muslin and paper and gauze, and ventilated at times by a thorough
draught.

The milliners' windows were full of impossible hats and
bonnets, displayed apparently for advertisement rather than for sale,
each on a separate iron spit with a knob at the top. The galleries were
decked out in all the colors of the rainbow. On what heads would those
dusty bonnets end their careers?--for a score of years the problem had
puzzled frequenters of the Palais. Saleswomen, usually plain-featured,
but vivacious, waylaid the feminine foot passenger with cunning
importunities, after the fashion of market-women, and using much the
same language; a shop-girl, who made free use of her eyes and tongue,
sat outside on a stool and harangued the public with "Buy a pretty
bonnet, madame?--Do let me sell you something!"--varying a rich and
picturesque vocabulary with inflections of the voice, with glances, and
remarks upon the passers-by. Booksellers and milliners lived on terms
of mutual understanding.

But it was in the passage known by the
pompous title of the "Glass Gallery" that the oddest trades were
carried on. Here were ventriloquists and charlatans of every sort, and
sights of every description, from the kind where there is nothing to
see to panoramas of the globe. One man who has since made seven or
eight hundred thousand francs by traveling from fair to fair began here
by hanging out a signboard, a revolving sun in a blackboard, and the
inscription in red letters: "Here Man may see what God can never see.
Admittance, two sous." The showman at the door never admitted one
person alone, nor more than two at a time. Once inside, you confronted
a great looking-glass; and a voice, which might have terrified Hoffmann
of Berlin, suddenly spoke as if some spring had been touched, "You see
here, gentlemen, something that God can never see through all eternity,
that is to say, your like. God has not His like." And out you went, too
shamefaced to confess to your stupidity.

Voices issued from
every narrow doorway, crying up the merits of Cosmoramas, views of
Constantinople, marionettes, automatic chess-players, and performing
dogs who would pick you out the prettiest woman in the company. The
ventriloquist Fritz-James flourished here in the Cafe Borel before he
went to fight and fall at Montmartre with the young lads from the Ecole
polytechnique. Here, too, there were fruit and flower shops, and a
famous tailor whose gold-laced uniforms shone like the sun when the
shops were lighted at night.

Of a morning the galleries were
empty, dark, and deserted; the shopkeepers chatted among themselves.
Towards two o'clock in the afternoon the Palais began to fill; at
three, men came in from the Bourse, and Paris, generally speaking,
crowded the place. Impecunious youth, hungering after literature, took
the opportunity of turning over the pages of the books exposed for sale
on the stalls outside the booksellers' shops; the men in charge
charitably allowed a poor student to pursue his course of free studies;
and in this way a duodecimo volume of some two hundred pages, such as
_Smarra_ or _Pierre Schlemihl_, or _Jean Sbogar_ or _Jocko_, might be
devoured in a couple of afternoons. There was something very French in
this alms given to the young, hungry, starved intellect. Circulating
libraries were not as yet; if you wished to read a book, you were
obliged to buy it, for which reason novels of the early part of the
century were sold in numbers which now seem well-nigh fabulous to us.

But
the poetry of this terrible mart appeared in all its splendor at the
close of the day. Women of the town, flocking in and out from the
neighboring streets, were allowed to make a promenade of the Wooden
Galleries. Thither came prostitutes from every quarter of Paris to "do
the Palais." The Stone Galleries belonged to privileged houses, which
paid for the right of exposing women dressed like princesses under such
and such an arch, or in the corresponding space of garden; but the
Wooden Galleries were the common ground of women of the streets. This
was _the_ Palais, a word which used to signify the temple of
prostitution. A woman might come and go, taking away her prey
whithersoever seemed good to her. So great was the crowd attracted
thither at night by the women, that it was impossible to move except at
a slow pace, as in a procession or at a masked ball. Nobody objected to
the slowness; it facilitated examination. The women dressed in a way
that is never seen nowadays. The bodices cut extremely low both back
and front; the fantastical head-dresses, designed to attract notice;
here a cap from the Pays de Caux, and there a Spanish mantilla; the
hair crimped and curled like a poodle's, or smoothed down in bandeaux
over the forehead; the close-fitting white stockings and limbs,
revealed it would not be easy to say how, but always at the right
moment--all this poetry of vice has fled. The license of question and
reply, the public cynicism in keeping with the haunt, is now unknown
even at masquerades or the famous public balls. It was an appalling,
gay scene. The dazzling white flesh of the women's necks and shoulders
stood out in magnificent contrast against the men's almost invariably
sombre costumes. The murmur of voices, the hum of the crowd, could be
heard even in the middle of the garden as a sort of droning bass,
interspersed with _fioriture_ of shrill laughter or clamor of some rare
dispute. You saw gentlemen and celebrities cheek by jowl with
gallows-birds. There was something indescribably piquant about the
anomalous assemblage; the most insensible of men felt its charm, so
much so, that, until the very last moment, Paris came hither to walk up
and down on the wooden planks laid over the cellars where men were at
work on the new buildings; and when the squalid wooden erections were
finally taken down, great and unanimous regret was felt.

Ladvocat
the bookseller had opened a shop but a few days since in the angle
formed by the central passage which crossed the galleries; and
immediately opposite another bookseller, now forgotten, Dauriat, a bold
and youthful pioneer, who opened up the paths in which his rival was to
shine. Dauriat's shop stood in the row which gave upon the garden;
Ladvocat's, on the opposite side, looked out upon the court. Dauriat's
establishment was divided into two parts; his shop was simply a great
trade warehouse, and the second room was his private office.

Lucien,
on this first visit to the Wooden Galleries, was bewildered by a sight
which no novice can resist. He soon lost the guide who befriended him.

"If
you were as good-looking as yonder young fellow, I would give you your
money's worth," a woman said, pointing out Lucien to an old man.

Lucien
slunk through the crowd like a blind man's dog, following the stream in
a state of stupefaction and excitement difficult to describe.
Importuned by glances and white-rounded contours, dazzled by the
audacious display of bared throat and bosom, he gripped his roll of
manuscript tightly lest somebody should steal it--innocent that he was!

"Well,
what is it, sir!" he exclaimed, thinking, when some one caught him by
the arm, that his poetry had proved too great a temptation to some
author's honesty, and turning, he recognized Lousteau.

"I felt sure that you would find your way here at last," said his
friend.

The
poet was standing in the doorway of a shop crowded with persons waiting
for an audience with the sultan of the publishing trade. Printers,
paper-dealers, and designers were catechizing Dauriat's assistants as
to present or future business.

Lousteau drew Lucien into the
shop. "There! that is Finot who edits my paper," he said; "he is
talking with Felicien Vernou, who has abilities, but the little wretch
is as dangerous as a hidden disease."

"Well, old boy, there is a first night for you," said Finot, coming up
with Vernou. "I have disposed of the box."

"Sold it to Braulard?"

"Well,
and if I did, what then? You will get a seat. What do you want with
Dauriat? Oh, it is agreed that we are to push Paul de Kock, Dauriat has
taken two hundred copies, and Victor Ducange is refusing to give him
his next. Dauriat wants to set up another man in the same line, he
says. You must rate Paul de Kock above Ducange."

"But I have a piece on with Ducange at the Gaite," said Lousteau.

"Very
well, tell him that I wrote the article. It can be supposed that I
wrote a slashing review, and you toned it down; and he will owe you
thanks."

"Couldn't you get Dauriat's cashier to discount this
bit of a bill for a hundred francs?" asked Etienne Lousteau. "We are
celebrating Florine's house-warming with a supper to-night, you know."

"Ah!
yes, you are treating us all," said Finot, with an apparent effort of
memory. "Here, Gabusson," he added, handing Barbet's bill to the
cashier, "let me have ninety francs for this individual.--Fill in your
name, old man."

Lousteau signed his name while the cashier
counted out the money; and Lucien, all eyes and ears, lost not a
syllable of the conversation.

"That is not all, my friend,"
Etienne continued; "I don't thank you, we have sworn an eternal
friendship. I have taken it upon myself to introduce this gentleman to
Dauriat, and you must incline his ear to listen to us."

"What is on foot?" asked Finot.

"A volume of poetry," said Lucien.

"Oh!" said Finot, with a shrug of the shoulders.

"Your
acquaintance cannot have had much to do with publishers, or he would
have hidden his manuscript in the loneliest spot in his dwelling,"
remarked Vernou, looking at Lucien as he spoke.

Just at that
moment a good-looking young man came into the shop, gave a hand to
Finot and Lousteau, and nodded slightly to Vernou. The newcomer was
Emile Blondet, who had made his first appearance in the _Journal des
Debats_, with articles revealing capacities of the very highest order.

"Come and have supper with us at midnight, at Florine's," said Lousteau.

"Very good," said the newcomer. "But who is going to be there?"

"Oh,
Florine and Matifat the druggist," said Lousteau, "and du Bruel, the
author who gave Florine the part in which she is to make her first
appearance, a little old fogy named Cardot, and his son-in-law Camusot,
and Finot, and----"

"Does your druggist do things properly?"

"He will not give us doctored wine," said Lucien.

"You are very witty, monsieur," Blondet returned gravely. "Is he
coming, Lousteau?"

"Yes."

"Then we shall have some fun."

Lucien had flushed red to the tips of his ears. Blondet tapped on the
window above Dauriat's desk.

"Is your business likely to keep you long, Dauriat?"

"I am at your service, my friend."

"That's
right," said Lousteau, addressing his protege. "That young fellow is
hardly any older than you are, and he is on the _Debats_! He is one of
the princes of criticism. They are afraid of him, Dauriat will fawn
upon him, and then we can put in a word about our business with the
pasha of vignettes and type. Otherwise we might have waited till eleven
o'clock, and our turn would not have come. The crowd of people waiting
to speak with Dauriat is growing bigger every moment."

Lucien and Lousteau followed Blondet, Finot, and Vernou, and stood in a
knot at the back of the shop.

"What is he doing?" asked Blondet of the head-clerk, who rose to bid
him good-evening.

"He
is buying a weekly newspaper. He wants to put new life into it, and set
up a rival to the _Minerve_ and the _Conservateur_; Eymery has rather
too much of his own way in the _Minerve_, and the _Conservateur_ is too
blindly Romantic."

"Is he going to pay well?"

"Only too much--as usual," said the cashier.

Just
as he spoke another young man entered; this was the writer of a
magnificent novel which had sold very rapidly and met with the greatest
possible success. Dauriat was bringing out a second edition. The
appearance of this odd and extraordinary looking being, so unmistakably
an artist, made a deep impression on Lucien's mind.

"That is Nathan," Lousteau said in his ear.

Nathan,
then in the prime of his youth, came up to the group of journalists,
hat in hand; and in spite of his look of fierce pride he was almost
humble to Blondet, whom as yet he only knew by sight. Blondet did not
remove his hat, neither did Finot.

"Monsieur, I am delighted to avail myself of an opportunity yielded by
chance----"

("He is so nervous that he is committing a pleonasm," said Felicien in
an aside to Lousteau.)

"----to
give expression to my gratitude for the splendid review which you were
so good as to give me in the _Journal des Debats_. Half the success of
my book is owing to you."

"No, my dear fellow, no," said
Blondet, with an air of patronage scarcely masked by good-nature. "You
have talent, the deuce you have, and I'm delighted to make your
acquaintance."

"Now that your review has appeared, I shall not
seem to be courting power; we can feel at ease. Will you do me the
honor and the pleasure of dining with me to-morrow? Finot is
coming.--Lousteau, old man, you will not refuse me, will you?" added
Nathan, shaking Etienne by the hand.--"Ah, you are on the way to a
great future, monsieur," he added, turning again to Blondet; "you will
carry on the line of Dussaults, Fievees, and Geoffrois! Hoffmann was
talking about you to a friend of mine, Claude Vignon, his pupil; he
said that he could die in peace, the _Journal des Debats_ would live
forever. They ought to pay you tremendously well."

"A hundred
francs a column," said Blondet. "Poor pay when one is obliged to read
the books, and read a hundred before you find one worth interesting
yourself in, like yours. Your work gave me pleasure, upon my word."

"And brought him in fifteen hundred francs," said Lousteau for Lucien's
benefit.

"But you write political articles, don't you?" asked Nathan.

"Yes; now and again."

Lucien
felt like an embryo among these men; he had admired Nathan's book, he
had reverenced the author as an immortal; Nathan's abject attitude
before this critic, whose name and importance were both unknown to him,
stupefied Lucien.

"How if I should come to behave as he does?"
he thought. "Is a man obliged to part with his self-respect?--Pray put
on your hat again, Nathan; you have written a great book, and the
critic has only written a review of it."

These thoughts set the
blood tingling in his veins. Scarce a minute passed but some young
author, poverty-stricken and shy, came in, asked to speak with Dauriat,
looked round the crowded shop despairingly, and went out saying, "I
will come back again." Two or three politicians were chatting over the
convocation of the Chambers and public business with a group of
well-known public men. The weekly newspaper for which Dauriat was in
treaty was licensed to treat of matters political, and the number of
newspapers suffered to exist was growing smaller and smaller, till a
paper was a piece of property as much in demand as a theatre. One of
the largest shareholders in the _Constitutionnel_ was standing in the
midst of the knot of political celebrities. Lousteau performed the part
of cicerone to admiration; with every sentence he uttered Dauriat rose
higher in Lucien's opinion. Politics and literature seemed to converge
in Dauriat's shop. He had seen a great poet prostituting his muse to
journalism, humiliating Art, as woman was humiliated and prostituted in
those shameless galleries without, and the provincial took a terrible
lesson to heart. Money! That was the key to every enigma. Lucien
realized the fact that he was unknown and alone, and that the fragile
clue of an uncertain friendship was his sole guide to success and
fortune. He blamed the kind and loyal little circle for painting the
world for him in false colors, for preventing him from plunging into
the arena, pen in hand. "I should be a Blondet at this moment!" he
exclaimed within himself.

Only a little while ago they had sat
looking out over Paris from the Gardens of the Luxembourg, and Lousteau
had uttered the cry of a wounded eagle; then Lousteau had been a great
man in Lucien's eyes, and now he had shrunk to scarce visible
proportions. The really important man for him at this moment was the
fashionable bookseller, by whom all these men lived; and the poet,
manuscript in hand, felt a nervous tremor that was almost like fear. He
noticed a group of busts mounted on wooden pedestals, painted to
resemble marble; Byron stood there, and Goethe and M. de Canalis.
Dauriat was hoping to publish a volume by the last-named poet, who
might see, on his entrance into the shop, the estimation in which he
was held by the trade. Unconsciously Lucien's own self-esteem began to
shrink, and his courage ebbed. He began to see how large a part this
Dauriat would play in his destinies, and waited impatiently for him to
appear.

"Well, children," said a voice, and a short, stout man
appeared, with a puffy face that suggested a Roman pro-consul's visage,
mellowed by an air of good-nature which deceived superficial observers.
"Well, children, here am I, the proprietor of the only weekly paper in
the market, a paper with two thousand subscribers!"

"Old joker! The registered number is seven hundred, and that is over
the mark," said Blondet.

"Twelve
thousand, on my sacred word of honor--I said two thousand for the
benefit of the printers and paper-dealers yonder," he added, lowering
his voice, then raising it again. "I thought you had more tact, my
boy," he added.

"Are you going to take any partners?" inquired Finot.

"That depends," said Dauriat. "Will you take a third at forty thousand
francs?"

"It's
a bargain, if you will take Emile Blondet here on the staff, and Claude
Vignon, Scribe, Theodore Leclercq, Felicien Vernou, Jay, Jouy,
Lousteau, and----"

"And why not Lucien de Rubempre?" the provincial poet put in boldly.

"----and Nathan," concluded Finot.

"Why
not the people out there in the street?" asked Dauriat, scowling at the
author of the _Marguerites_.--"To whom have I the honor of speaking?"
he added, with an insolent glance.

"One moment, Dauriat," said
Lousteau. "I have brought this gentleman to you. Listen to me, while
Finot is thinking over your proposals."

Lucien watched this
Dauriat, who addressed Finot with the familiar tu, which even Finot did
not permit himself to use in reply; who called the redoubtable Blondet
"my boy," and extended a hand royally to Nathan with a friendly nod.
The provincial poet felt his shirt wet with perspiration when the
formidable sultan looked indifferent and ill pleased.

"Another
piece of business, my boy!" exclaimed Dauriat. "Why, I have eleven
hundred manuscripts on hand, as you know! Yes, gentlemen, I have eleven
hundred manuscripts submitted to me at this moment; ask Gabusson. I
shall soon be obliged to start a department to keep account of the
stock of manuscripts, and a special office for reading them, and a
committee to vote on their merits, with numbered counters for those who
attend, and a permanent secretary to draw up the minutes for me. It
will be a kind of local branch of the Academie, and the Academicians
will be better paid in the Wooden Galleries than at the Institut."

"'Tis an idea," said Blondet.

"A
bad idea," returned Dauriat. "It is not my business to take stock of
the lucubrations of those among you who take to literature because they
cannot be capitalists, and there is no opening for them as bootmakers,
nor corporals, nor domestic servants, nor officials, nor bailiffs.
Nobody comes here until he has made a name for himself! Make a name for
yourself, and you will find gold in torrents. I have made three great
men in the last two years; and lo and behold three examples of
ingratitude! Here is Nathan talking of six thousand francs for the
second edition of his book, which cost me three thousand francs in
reviews, and has not brought in a thousand yet. I paid a thousand
francs for Blondet's two articles, besides a dinner, which cost me five
hundred----"

"But if all booksellers talked as you do, sir, how
could a man publish his first book at all?" asked Lucien. Blondet had
gone down tremendously in his opinion since he had heard the amount
given by Dauriat for the articles in the _Debats_.

"That is not
my affair," said Dauriat, looking daggers at this handsome young
fellow, who was smiling pleasantly at him. "I do not publish books for
amusement, nor risk two thousand francs for the sake of seeing my money
back again. I speculate in literature, and publish forty volumes of ten
thousand copies each, just as Panckouke does and the Baudoins. With my
influence and the articles which I secure, I can push a business of a
hundred thousand crowns, instead of a single volume involving a couple
of thousand francs. It is just as much trouble to bring out a new name
and to induce the public to take up an author and his book, as to make
a success with the _Theatres etrangers_, _Victoires et Conquetes_, or
_Memoires sur la Revolution_, books that bring in a fortune. I am not
here as a stepping-stone to future fame, but to make money, and to find
it for men with distinguished names. The manuscripts for which I give a
hundred thousand francs pay me better than work by an unknown author
who asks six hundred. If I am not exactly a Maecenas, I deserve the
gratitude of literature; I have doubled the prices of manuscripts. I am
giving you this explanation because you are a friend of Lousteau's my
boy," added Dauriat, clapping Lucien on the shoulder with odious
familiarity. "If I were to talk to all the authors who have a mind that
I should be their publisher, I should have to shut up shop; I should
pass my time very agreeably no doubt, but the conversations would cost
too much. I am not rich enough yet to listen to all the monologues of
self-conceit. Nobody does, except in classical tragedies on the stage."

The terrible Dauriat's gorgeous raiment seemed in the provincial poet's
eyes to add force to the man's remorseless logic.

"What is it about?" he continued, addressing Lucien's protector.

"It is a volume of magnificent poetry."

At that word, Dauriat turned to Gabusson with a gesture worthy of Talma.

"Gabusson,
my friend," he said, "from this day forward, when anybody begins to
talk of works in manuscript here--Do you hear that, all of you?" he
broke in upon himself; and three assistants at once emerged from among
the piles of books at the sound of their employer's wrathful voice. "If
anybody comes here with manuscripts," he continued, looking at the
finger-nails of a well-kept hand, "ask him whether it is poetry or
prose; and if he says poetry, show him the door at once. Verses mean
reverses in the booktrade."

"Bravo! well put, Dauriat," cried the chorus of journalists.

"It
is true!" cried the bookseller, striding about his shop with Lucien's
manuscript in his hand. "You have no idea, gentlemen, of the amount of
harm that Byron, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Casimir Delavigne, Canalis,
and Beranger have done by their success. The fame of them has brought
down an invasion of barbarians upon us. I know _this_: there are a
thousand volumes of manuscript poetry going the round of the publishers
at this moment, things that nobody can make head nor tail of, stories
in verse that begin in the middle, like _The Corsair_ and _Lara_. They
set up to be original, forsooth, and indulge in stanzas that nobody can
understand, and descriptive poetry after the pattern of the younger men
who discovered Delille, and imagine that they are doing something new.
Poets have been swarming like cockchafers for two years past. I have
lost twenty thousand francs through poetry in the last twelvemonth. You
ask Gabusson! There may be immortal poets somewhere in the world; I
know of some that are blooming and rosy, and have no beards on their
chins as yet," he continued, looking at Lucien; "but in the trade,
young man, there are only four poets --Beranger, Casimir Delavigne,
Lamartine, and Victor Hugo; as for Canalis--he is a poet made by sheer
force of writing him up."

Lucien felt that he lacked the courage
to hold up his head and show his spirit before all these influential
persons, who were laughing with all their might. He knew very well that
he should look hopelessly ridiculous, and yet he felt consumed by a
fierce desire to catch the bookseller by the throat, to ruffle the
insolent composure of his cravat, to break the gold chain that
glittered on the man's chest, trample his watch under his feet, and
tear him in pieces. Mortified vanity opened the door to thoughts of
vengeance, and inwardly he swore eternal enmity to that bookseller. But
he smiled amiably.

"Poetry is like the sun," said Blondet,
"giving life alike to primeval forests and to ants and gnats and
mosquitoes. There is no virtue but has a vice to match, and literature
breeds the publisher."

"And the journalist," said Lousteau.

Dauriat burst out laughing.

"What is this after all?" he asked, holding up the manuscript.

"A volume of sonnets that will put Petrarch to the blush," said
Lousteau.

"What do you mean?"

"Just
what I say," answered Lousteau, seeing the knowing smile that went
round the group. Lucien could not take offence but he chafed inwardly.

"Very
well, I will read them," said Dauriat, with a regal gesture that marked
the full extent of the concession. "If these sonnets of yours are up to
the level of the nineteenth century, I will make a great poet of you,
my boy."

"If he has brains to equal his good looks, you will run
no great risks," remarked one of the greatest public speakers of the
day, a deputy who was chatting with the editor of the _Minerve_, and a
writer for the _Constitutionnel_.

"Fame means twelve thousand
francs in reviews, and a thousand more for dinners, General," said
Dauriat. "If M. Benjamin de Constant means to write a paper on this
young poet, it will not be long before I make a bargain with him."

At
the title of General, and the distinguished name of Benjamin Constant,
the bookseller's shop took the proportions of Olympus for the
provincial great man.

"Lousteau, I want a word with you," said
Finot; "but I shall see you again later, at the theatre.--Dauriat, I
will take your offer, but on conditions. Let us step into your office."

"Come
in, my boy," answered Dauriat, allowing Finot to pass before him. Then,
intimating to some ten persons still waiting for him that he was
engaged, he likewise was about to disappear when Lucien impatiently
stopped him.

"You are keeping my manuscript. When shall I have an answer?"

"Oh, come back in three or four days, my little poet, and we will see."

Lousteau
hurried Lucien away; he had not time to take leave of Vernou and
Blondet and Raoul Nathan, nor to salute General Foy nor Benjamin
Constant, whose book on the Hundred Days was just about to appear.
Lucien scarcely caught a glimpse of fair hair, a refined oval-shaped
face, keen eyes, and the pleasant-looking mouth belonging to the man
who had played the part of a Potemkin to Mme. de Stael for twenty
years, and now was at war with the Bourbons, as he had been at war with
Napoleon. He was destined to win his cause and to die stricken to earth
by his victory.

"What a shop!" exclaimed Lucien, as he took his place in the cab beside
Lousteau.

"To
the Panorama-Dramatique; look sharp, and you shall have thirty sous,"
Etienne Lousteau called to the cabman.--"Dauriat is a rascal who sells
books to the amount of fifteen or sixteen hundred thousand francs every
year. He is a kind of Minister of Literature," Lousteau continued. His
self-conceit had been pleasantly tickled, and he was showing off before
Lucien. "Dauriat is just as grasping as Barbet, but it is on a
wholesale scale. Dauriat can be civil, and he is generous, but he has a
great opinion of himself; as for his wit, it consists in a faculty for
picking up all that he hears, and his shop is a capital place to
frequent. You meet all the best men at Dauriat's. A young fellow learns
more there in an hour than by poring over books for half-a-score of
years. People talk about articles and concoct subjects; you make the
acquaintance of great or influential people who may be useful to you.
You must know people if you mean to get on nowadays.--It is all luck,
you see. And as for sitting by yourself in a corner alone with your
intellect, it is the most dangerous thing of all."

"But what insolence!" said Lucien.

"Pshaw!
we all of us laugh at Dauriat," said Etienne. "If you are in need of
him, he tramples upon you; if he has need of the _Journal des Debats_,
Emile Blondet sets him spinning like a top. Oh, if you take to
literature, you will see a good many queer things. Well, what was I
telling you, eh?"

"Yes, you were right," said Lucien. "My experience in that shop was
even more painful than I expected, after your programme."

"Why
do you choose to suffer? You find your subject, you wear out your wits
over it with toiling at night, you throw your very life into it: and
after all your journeyings in the fields of thought, the monument
reared with your life-blood is simply a good or a bad speculation for a
publisher. Your work will sell or it will not sell; and therein, for
them, lies the whole question. A book means so much capital to risk,
and the better the book, the less likely it is to sell. A man of talent
rises above the level of ordinary heads; his success varies in direct
ratio with the time required for his work to be appreciated. And no
publisher wants to wait. To-day's book must be sold by to-morrow.
Acting on this system, publishers and booksellers do not care to take
real literature, books that call for the high praise that comes slowly."

"D'Arthez was right," exclaimed Lucien.

"Do
you know d'Arthez?" asked Lousteau. "I know of no more dangerous
company than solitary spirits like that fellow yonder, who fancy that
they can draw the world after them. All of us begin by thinking that we
are capable of great things; and when once a youthful imagination is
heated by this superstition, the candidate for posthumous honors makes
no attempt to move the world while such moving of the world is both
possible and profitable; he lets the time go by. I am for Mahomet's
system--if the mountain does not come to me, I am for going to the
mountain."

The common-sense so trenchantly put in this sally
left Lucien halting between the resignation preached by the brotherhood
and Lousteau's militant doctrine. He said not a word till they reached
the Boulevard du Temple.

The Panorama-Dramatique no longer
exists. A dwelling-house stands on the site of the once charming
theatre in the Boulevard du Temple, where two successive managements
collapsed without making a single hit; and yet Vignol, who has since
fallen heir to some of Potier's popularity, made his _debut_ there; and
Florine, five years later a celebrated actress, made her first
appearance in the theatre opposite the Rue Charlot. Play-houses, like
men, have their vicissitudes. The Panorama-Dramatique suffered from
competition. The machinations of its rivals, the Ambigu, the Gaite, the
Porte Saint-Martin, and the Vaudeville, together with a plethora of
restrictions and a scarcity of good plays, combined to bring about the
downfall of the house. No dramatic author cared to quarrel with a
prosperous theatre for the sake of the Panorama-Dramatique, whose
existence was, to say the least, problematical. The management at this
moment, however, was counting on the success of a new melodramatic
comedy by M. du Bruel, a young author who, after working in
collaboration with divers celebrities, had now produced a piece
professedly entirely his own. It had been specially composed for the
leading lady, a young actress who began her stage career as a
supernumerary at the Gaite, and had been promoted to small parts for
the last twelvemonth. But though Mlle. Florine's acting had attracted
some attention, she obtained no engagement, and the Panorama
accordingly had carried her off. Coralie, another actress, was to make
her _debut_ at the same time.

Lucien was amazed at the power
wielded by the press. "This gentleman is with me," said Etienne
Lousteau, and the box-office clerks bowed before him as one man.

"You will find it no easy matter to get seats," said the head-clerk.
"There is nothing left now but the stage box."

A
certain amount of time was wasted in controversies with the box-keepers
in the lobbies, when Etienne said, "Let us go behind the scenes; we
will speak to the manager, he will take us into the stage-box; and
besides, I will introduce you to Florine, the heroine of the evening."

At
a sign from Etienne Lousteau, the doorkeeper of the orchestra took out
a little key and unlocked a door in the thickness of the wall. Lucien,
following his friend, went suddenly out of the lighted corridor into
the black darkness of the passage between the house and the wings. A
short flight of damp steps surmounted, one of the strangest of all
spectacles opened out before the provincial poet's eyes. The height of
the roof, the slenderness of the props, the ladders hung with Argand
lamps, the atrocious ugliness of scenery beheld at close quarters, the
thick paint on the actors' faces, and their outlandish costumes, made
of such coarse materials, the stage carpenters in greasy jackets, the
firemen, the stage manager strutting about with his hat on his head,
the supernumeraries sitting among the hanging back-scenes, the ropes
and pulleys, the heterogeneous collection of absurdities, shabby,
dirty, hideous, and gaudy, was something so altogether different from
the stage seen over the footlights, that Lucien's astonishment knew no
bounds. The curtain was just about to fall on a good old-fashioned
melodrama entitled _Bertram_, a play adapted from a tragedy by Maturin
which Charles Nodier, together with Byron and Sir Walter Scott, held in
the highest esteem, though the play was a failure on the stage in Paris.

"Keep
a tight hold of my arm, unless you have a mind to fall through a
trap-door, or bring down a forest on your head; you will pull down a
palace, or carry off a cottage, if you are not careful," said Etienne.
--"Is Florine in her dressing-room, my pet?" he added, addressing an
actress who stood waiting for her cue.

"Yes, love. Thank you for the things you said about me. You are so much
nicer since Florine has come here."

"In
the morning I hold the views of my paper," said Nathan, "in the evening
I think as I please; all journalists see double at night."

Felicien Vernou turned to Lousteau.

"Finot is looking for you, Etienne; he came with me, and--here he is!"

"Ah, by the by, there is not a place in the house, is there?" asked
Finot.

"You will always find a place in our hearts," said the actress, with
the sweetest smile imaginable.

"I say, my little Florville, are you cured already of your fancy? They
told me that a Russian prince had carried you off."

"Who
carries off women in these days" said Florville (she who had cried,
"Stop, wretched man!"). "We stayed at Saint-Mande for ten days, and my
prince got off with paying the forfeit money to the management. The
manager will go down on his knees to pray for some more Russian
princes," Florville continued, laughing; "the forfeit money was so much
clear gain."

"And as for you, child," said Finot, turning to a
pretty girl in a peasant's costume, "where did you steal these diamond
ear-drops? Have you hooked an Indian prince?"

"No, a blacking
manufacturer, an Englishman, who has gone off already. It is not
everybody who can find millionaire shopkeepers, tired of domestic life,
whenever they like, as Florine does and Coralie. Aren't they just
lucky?"

"Florville, you will make a bad entry," said Lousteau; "the blacking
has gone to your head!"

"If
you want a success," said Nathan, "instead of screaming, 'He is saved!'
like a Fury, walk on quite quietly, go to the staircase, and say, 'He
is saved,' in a chest voice, like Pasta's '_O patria_,' in
_Tancreda_.--There, go along!" and he pushed her towards the stage.

"It is too late," said Vernou, "the effect has hung fire."

"What did she do? the house is applauding like mad," asked Lousteau.

"Went down on her knees and showed her bosom; that is her great
resource," said the blacking-maker's widow.

"The
manager is giving up the stage box to us; you will find me there when
you come," said Finot, as Lousteau walked off with Lucien.

At
the back of the stage, through a labyrinth of scenery and corridors,
the pair climbed several flights of stairs and reached a little room on
a third floor, Nathan and Felicien Vernou following them.

"Good-day
or good-night, gentlemen," said Florine. Then, turning to a short,
stout man standing in a corner, "These gentlemen are the rulers of my
destiny," she said, my future is in their hands; but they will be under
our table to-morrow morning, I hope, if M. Lousteau has forgotten
nothing----"

"Forgotten! You are going to have Blondet of the
_Debats_," said Etienne, "the genuine Blondet, the very
Blondet--Blondet himself, in short."

"Oh! Lousteau, you dear
boy! stop, I must give you a kiss," and she flung her arms about the
journalist's neck. Matifat, the stout person in the corner, looked
serious at this.

Florine was thin; her beauty, like a bud, gave
promise of the flower to come; the girl of sixteen could only delight
the eyes of artists who prefer the sketch to the picture. All the quick
subtlety of her character was visible in the features of the charming
actress, who at that time might have sat for Goethe's Mignon. Matifat,
a wealthy druggist of the Rue des Lombards, had imagined that a little
Boulevard actress would have no very expensive tastes, but in eleven
months Florine had cost him sixty thousand francs. Nothing seemed more
extraordinary to Lucien than the sight of an honest and worthy merchant
standing like a statue of the god Terminus in the actress' narrow
dressing-room, a tiny place some ten feet square, hung with a pretty
wall-paper, and adorned with a full-length mirror, a sofa, and two
chairs. There was a fireplace in the dressing-closet, a carpet on the
floor, and cupboards all round the room. A dresser was putting the
finishing touches to a Spanish costume; for Florine was to take the
part of a countess in an imbroglio.

"That girl will be the handsomest actress in Paris in five years'
time," said Nathan, turning to Felicien Vernou.

"By
the by, darlings, you will take care of me to-morrow, won't you?" said
Florine, turning to the three journalists. "I have engaged cabs for
to-night, for I am going to send you home as tipsy as Shrove Tuesday.
Matifat has sent in wines--oh! wines worthy of Louis XVIII., and
engaged the Prussian ambassador's cook."

"We expect something enormous from the look of the gentleman," remarked
Nathan.

"And he is quite aware that he is treating the most dangerous men in
Paris," added Florine.

Matifat was looking uneasily at Lucien; he felt jealous of the young
man's good looks.

"But
here is some one that I do not know," Florine continued, confronting
Lucien. "Which of you has imported the Apollo Belvedere from Florence?
He is as charming as one of Girodet's figures."

"He is a poet,
mademoiselle, from the provinces. I forgot to present him to you; you
are so beautiful to-night that you put the _Complete Guide to
Etiquette_ out of a man's head----"

"Is he so rich that he can afford to write poetry?" asked Florine.

"Poor as Job," said Lucien.

"It is a great temptation for some of us," said the actress.

Just
then the author of the play suddenly entered, and Lucien beheld M. du
Bruel, a short, attenuated young man in an overcoat, a composite human
blend of the jack-in-office, the owner of house-property, and the
stockbroker.

"Florine, child," said this personage, "are you
sure of your part, eh? No slips of memory, you know. And mind that
scene in the second act, make the irony tell, bring out that subtle
touch; say, 'I do not love you,' just as we agreed."

"Why do you take parts in which you have to say such things?" asked
Matifat.

The druggist's remark was received with a general shout of laughter.

"What
does it matter to you," said Florine, "so long as I don't say such
things to you, great stupid?--Oh! his stupidity is the pleasure of my
life," she continued, glancing at the journalist. "Upon my word, I
would pay him so much for every blunder, if it would not be the ruin of
me."

"Yes, but you will look at me when you say it, as you do
when you are rehearsing, and it gives me a turn," remonstrated the
druggist.

"Very well, then, I will look at my friend Lousteau here."

A bell rang outside in the passage.

"Go out, all of you!" cried Florine; "let me read my part over again
and try to understand it."

Lucien
and Lousteau were the last to go. Lousteau set a kiss on Florine's
shoulder, and Lucien heard her say, "Not to-night. Impossible. That
stupid old animal told his wife that he was going out into the country."

"Isn't she charming?" said Etienne, as they came away.

"But--but that Matifat, my dear fellow----"

"Oh!
you know nothing of Parisian life, my boy. Some things cannot be
helped. Suppose that you fell in love with a married woman, it comes to
the same thing. It all depends on the way that you look at it."

Etienne
and Lucien entered the stage-box, and found the manager there with
Finot. Matifat was in the ground-floor box exactly opposite with a
friend of his, a silk-mercer named Camusot (Coralie's protector), and a
worthy little old soul, his father-in-law. All three of these city men
were polishing their opera-glasses, and anxiously scanning the house;
certain symptoms in the pit appeared to disturb them. The usual
heterogeneous first-night elements filled the boxes--journalists and
their mistresses, _lorettes_ and their lovers, a sprinkling of the
determined playgoers who never miss a first night if they can help it,
and a very few people of fashion who care for this sort of sensation.
The first box was occupied by the head of a department, to whom du
Bruel, maker of vaudevilles, owed a snug little sinecure in the
Treasury.

Lucien had gone from surprise to surprise since the
dinner at Flicoteaux's. For two months Literature had meant a life of
poverty and want; in Lousteau's room he had seen it at its cynical
worst; in the Wooden Galleries he had met Literature abject and
Literature insolent. The sharp contrasts of heights and depths; of
compromise with conscience; of supreme power and want of principle; of
treachery and pleasure; of mental elevation and bondage--all this made
his head swim, he seemed to be watching some strange unheard-of drama.

Finot was talking with the manager. "Do you think du Bruel's piece will
pay?" he asked.

"Du
Bruel has tried to do something in Beaumarchais' style. Boulevard
audiences don't care for that kind of thing; they like harrowing
sensations; wit is not much appreciated here. Everything depends on
Florine and Coralie to-night; they are bewitchingly pretty and
graceful, wear very short skirts, and dance a Spanish dance, and
possibly they may carry off the piece with the public. The whole affair
is a gambling speculation. A few clever notices in the papers, and I
may make a hundred thousand crowns, if the play takes."

"Oh! come, it will only be a moderate success, I can see," said Finot.

"Three
of the theatres have got up a plot," continued the manager; "they will
even hiss the piece, but I have made arrangements to defeat their kind
intentions. I have squared the men in their pay; they will make a
muddle of it. A couple of city men yonder have taken a hundred tickets
apiece to secure a triumph for Florine and Coralie, and given them to
acquaintances able and ready to act as chuckers out. The fellows,
having been paid twice, will go quietly, and a scene of that sort
always makes a good impression on the house."

"Two hundred tickets! What invaluable men!" exclaimed Finot.

"Yes. With two more actresses as handsomely kept as Florine and
Coralie, I should make something out of the business."

For
the past two hours the word money had been sounding in Lucien's ears as
the solution of every difficulty. In the theatre as in the publishing
trade, and in the publishing trade as in the newspaper-office--it was
everywhere the same; there was not a word of art or of glory. The
steady beat of the great pendulum, Money, seemed to fall like
hammer-strokes on his heart and brain. And yet while the orchestra
played the overture, while the pit was full of noisy tumult of applause
and hisses, unconsciously he drew a comparison between this scene and
others that came up in his mind. Visions arose before him of David and
the printing-office, of the poetry that he came to know in that
atmosphere of pure peace, when together they beheld the wonders of Art,
the high successes of genius, and visions of glory borne on stainless
wings. He thought of the evenings spent with d'Arthez and his friends,
and tears glittered in his eyes.

"What is the matter with you?" asked Etienne Lousteau.

"I see poetry fallen into the mire."

"Ah! you have still some illusions left, my dear fellow."

"Is
there nothing for it but to cringe and submit to thickheads like
Matifat and Camusot, as actresses bow down to journalists, and we
ourselves to the booksellers?"

"My boy, do you see that
dull-brained fellow?" said Etienne, lowering his voice, and glancing at
Finot. "He has neither genius nor cleverness, but he is covetous; he
means to make a fortune at all costs, and he is a keen man of business.
Didn't you see how he made forty per cent out of me at Dauriat's, and
talked as if he were doing me a favor?--Well, he gets letters from not
a few unknown men of genius who go down on their knees to him for a
hundred francs."

The words recalled the pen-and-ink sketch that
lay on the table in the editor's office and the words, "Finot, my
hundred francs!" Lucien's inmost soul shrank from the man in disgust.

"I would sooner die," he said.

"Sooner live," retorted Etienne.

The curtain rose, and the stage-manager went off to the wings to give
orders. Finot turned to Etienne.

"My
dear fellow, Dauriat has passed his word; I am proprietor of one-third
of his weekly paper. I have agreed to give thirty thousand francs in
cash, on condition that I am to be editor and director. 'Tis a splendid
thing. Blondet told me that the Government intends to take restrictive
measures against the press; there will be no new papers allowed; in six
months' time it will cost a million francs to start a new journal, so I
struck a bargain though I have only ten thousand francs in hand. Listen
to me. If you can sell one-half of my share, that is one-sixth of the
paper, to Matifat for thirty thousand francs, you shall be editor of my
little paper with a salary of two hundred and fifty francs per month. I
want in any case to have the control of my old paper, and to keep my
hold upon it; but nobody need know that, and your name will appear as
editor. You will be paid at the rate of five francs per column; you
need not pay contributors more than three francs, and you keep the
difference. That means another four hundred and fifty francs per month.
But, at the same time, I reserve the right to use the paper to attack
or defend men or causes, as I please; and you may indulge your own
likes and dislikes so long as you do not interfere with my schemes.
Perhaps I may be a Ministerialist, perhaps Ultra, I do not know yet;
but I mean to keep up my connections with the Liberal party (below the
surface). I can speak out with you; you are a good fellow. I might,
perhaps, give you the Chambers to do for another paper on which I work;
I am afraid I can scarcely keep on with it now. So let Florine do this
bit of jockeying; tell her to put the screw on her druggist. If I can't
find the money within forty-eight hours, I must cry off my bargain.
Dauriat sold another third to his printer and paper-dealer for thirty
thousand francs; so he has his own third _gratis_, and ten thousand
francs to the good, for he only gave fifty thousand for the whole
affair. And in another year's time the magazine will be worth two
hundred thousand francs, if the Court buys it up; if the Court has the
good sense to suppress newspapers, as they say."

"You are lucky," said Lousteau.

"If
you had gone through all that I have endured, you would not say that of
me. I had my fill of misery in those days, you see, and there was no
help for it. My father is a hatter; he still keeps a shop in the Rue du
Coq. Nothing but millions of money or a social cataclysm can open out
the way to my goal; and of the two alternatives, I don't know now that
the revolution is not the easier. If I bore your friend's name, I
should have a chance to get on. Hush, here comes the manager.
Good-bye," and Finot rose to his feet, "I am going to the Opera. I
shall very likely have a duel on my hands to-morrow, for I have put my
initials to a terrific attack on a couple of dancers under the
protection of two Generals. I am giving it them hot and strong at the
Opera."

"Aha?" said the manager.

"Yes. They are stingy
with me," returned Finot, "now cutting off a box, and now declining to
take fifty subscriptions. I have sent in my _ultimatum_; I mean to have
a hundred subscriptions out of them and a box four times a month. If
they take my terms, I shall have eight hundred readers and a thousand
paying subscribers, so we shall have twelve hundred with the New Year."

"You will end by ruining us," said the manager.

"_You_ are not much hurt with your ten subscriptions. I had two good
notices put into the _Constitutionnel_."

"Oh! I am not complaining of you," cried the manager.

"Good-bye
till to-morrow evening, Lousteau," said Finot. "You can give me your
answer at the Francais; there is a new piece on there; and as I shall
not be able to write the notice, you can take my box. I will give you
preference; you have worked yourself to death for me, and I am
grateful. Felicien Vernou offered twenty thousand francs for a third
share of my little paper, and to work without a salary for a
twelvemonth; but I want to be absolute master. Good-bye."

"He is not named Finot" (_finaud_, slyboots) "for nothing," said Lucien.

"He
is a gallows-bird that will get on in the world," said Etienne,
careless whether the wily schemer overheard the remark or not, as he
shut the door of the box.

"_He_!" said the manager. "He will be
a millionaire; he will enjoy the respect of all who know him; he may
perhaps have friends some day----"

"Good heavens! what a den!"
said Lucien. "And are you going to drag that excellent creature into
such a business?" he continued, looking at Florine, who gave them side
glances from the stage.

"She will carry it through too. You do not know the devotion and the
wiles of these beloved beings," said Lousteau.

"They
redeem their failings and expiate all their sins by boundless love,
when they love," said the manager. "A great love is all the grander in
an actress by reason of its violent contrast with her surroundings."

"And he who finds it, finds a diamond worthy of the proudest crown
lying in the mud," returned Lousteau.

"But
Coralie is not attending to her part," remarked the manager. "Coralie
is smitten with our friend here, all unsuspicious of his conquest, and
Coralie will make a fiasco; she is missing her cues, this is the second
time she had not heard the prompter. Pray, go into the corner,
monsieur," he continued. "If Coralie is smitten with you, I will go and
tell her that you have left the house."

"No! no!" cried
Lousteau; "tell Coralie that this gentleman is coming to supper, and
that she can do as she likes with him, and she will play like Mlle.
Mars."

The manager went, and Lucien turned to Etienne. "What! do
you mean to say that you will ask that druggist, through Mlle. Florine,
to pay thirty thousand francs for one-half a share, when Finot gave no
more for the whole of it? And ask without the slightest scruple?----"

Lousteau
interrupted Lucien before he had time to finish his expostulation. "My
dear boy, what country can you come from? The druggist is not a man; he
is a strong box delivered into our hands by his fancy for an actress."

"How about your conscience?"

"Conscience,
my dear fellow, is a stick which every one takes up to beat his
neighbor and not for application to his own back. Come, now! who the
devil are you angry with? In one day chance has worked a miracle for
you, a miracle for which I have been waiting these two years, and you
must needs amuse yourself by finding fault with the means? What! you
appear to me to possess intelligence; you seem to be in a fair way to
reach that freedom from prejudice which is a first necessity to
intellectual adventurers in the world we live in; and are you wallowing
in scruples worthy of a nun who accuses herself of eating an egg with
concupiscence? . . . If Florine succeeds, I shall be editor of a
newspaper with a fixed salary of two hundred and fifty francs per
month; I shall take the important plays and leave the vaudevilles to
Vernou, and you can take my place and do the Boulevard theatres, and so
get a foot in the stirrup. You will make three francs per column and
write a column a day--thirty columns a month means ninety francs; you
will have some sixty francs worth of books to sell to Barbet; and
lastly, you can demand ten tickets a month of each of your
theatres--that is, forty tickets in all--and sell them for forty francs
to a Barbet who deals in them (I will introduce you to the man), so you
will have two hundred francs coming in every month. Then if you make
yourself useful to Finot, you might get a hundred francs for an article
in this new weekly review of his, in which case you would show uncommon
talent, for all the articles are signed, and you cannot put in
slip-shod work as you can on a small paper. In that case you would be
making a hundred crowns a month. Now, my dear boy, there are men of
ability, like that poor d'Arthez, who dines at Flicoteaux's every day,
who may wait for ten years before they will make a hundred crowns; and
you will be making four thousand francs a year by your pen, to say
nothing of the books you will write for the trade, if you do work of
that kind.

"Now, a sub-prefect's salary only amounts to a
thousand crowns, and there he stops in his arrondissement, wearing away
time like the rung of a chair. I say nothing of the pleasure of going
to the theatre without paying for your seat, for that is a delight
which quickly palls; but you can go behind the scenes in four theatres.
Be hard and sarcastic for a month or two, and you will be simply
overwhelmed with invitations from actresses, and their adorers will pay
court to you; you will only dine at Flicoteaux's when you happen to
have less than thirty sous in your pocket and no dinner engagement. At
the Luxembourg, at five o'clock, you did not know which way to turn;
now, you are on the eve of entering a privileged class, you will be one
of the hundred persons who tell France what to think. In three days'
time, if all goes well, you can, if you choose, make a man's life a
curse to him by putting thirty jokes at his expense in print at the
rate of three a day; you can, if you choose, draw a revenue of pleasure
from the actresses at your theatres; you can wreck a good play and send
all Paris running after a bad one. If Dauriat declines to pay you for
your _Marguerites_, you can make him come to you, and meekly and humbly
implore you to take two thousand francs for them. If you have the
ability, and knock off two or three articles that threaten to spoil
some of Dauriat's speculations, or to ruin a book on which he counts,
you will see him come climbing up your stairs like a clematis, and
always at the door of your dwelling. As for your novel, the booksellers
who would show you more or less politely to the door at this moment
will be standing outside your attic in a string, and the value of the
manuscript, which old Doguereau valued at four hundred francs will rise
to four thousand. These are the advantages of the journalist's
profession. So let us do our best to keep all newcomers out of it. It
needs an immense amount of brains to make your way, and a still greater
amount of luck. And here are you quibbling over your good fortune! If
we had not met to-day, you see, at Flicoteaux's, you might have danced
attendance on the booksellers for another three years, or starved like
d'Arthez in a garret. By the time that d'Arthez is as learned as Bayle
and as great a writer of prose as Rousseau, we shall have made our
fortunes, you and I, and we shall hold his in our hands--wealth and
fame to give or to hold. Finot will be a deputy and proprietor of a
great newspaper, and we shall be whatever we meant to be--peers of
France, or prisoner for debt in Sainte-Pelagie."

"So Finot will
sell his paper to the highest bidder among the Ministers, just as he
sells favorable notices to Mme. Bastienne and runs down Mlle. Virginie,
saying that Mme. Bastienne's bonnets are superior to the millinery
which they praised at first!" said Lucien, recollecting that scene in
the office.

"My dear fellow, you are a simpleton," Lousteau
remarked drily. "Three years ago Finot was walking on the uppers of his
boots, dining for eighteen sous at Tabar's, and knocking off a
tradesman's prospectus (when he could get it) for ten francs. His
clothes hung together by some miracle as mysterious as the Immaculate
Conception. _Now_, Finot has a paper of his own, worth about a hundred
thousand francs. What with subscribers who pay and take no copies,
genuine subscriptions, and indirect taxes levied by his uncle, he is
making twenty thousand francs a year. He dines most sumptuously every
day; he has set up a cabriolet within the last month; and now, at last,
behold him the editor of a weekly review with a sixth share, for which
he will not pay a penny, a salary of five hundred francs per month, and
another thousand francs for supplying matter which costs him nothing,
and for which the firm pays. You yourself, to begin with, if Finot
consents to pay you fifty francs per sheet, will be only too glad to
let him have two or three articles for nothing. When you are in his
position, you can judge Finot; a man can only be tried by his peers.
And for you, is there not an immense future opening out before you, if
you will blindly minister to his enmity, attack at Finot's bidding, and
praise when he gives the word? Suppose that you yourself wish to be
revenged upon somebody, you can break a foe or friend on the wheel. You
have only to say to me, 'Lousteau, let us put an end to So-and-so,' and
we will kill him by a phrase put in the paper morning by morning; and
afterwards you can slay the slain with a solemn article in Finot's
weekly. Indeed, if it is a matter of capital importance to you, Finot
would allow you to bludgeon your man in a big paper with ten or twelve
thousand subscribers, _if_ you make yourself indispensable to Finot."

"Then are you sure that Florine can bring her druggist to make the
bargain?" asked Lucien, dazzled by these prospects.

"Quite
sure. Now comes the interval, I will go and tell her everything at once
in a word or two; it will be settled to-night. If Florine once has her
lesson by heart, she will have all my wit and her own besides."

"And
there sits that honest tradesman, gaping with open-mouthed admiration
at Florine, little suspecting that you are about to get thirty thousand
francs out of him!----"

"More twaddle! Anybody might think that
the man was going to be robbed!" cried Lousteau. "Why, my dear boy, if
the minister buys the newspaper, the druggist may make twenty thousand
francs in six months on an investment of thirty thousand. Matifat is
not looking at the newspaper, but at Florine's prospects. As soon as it
is known that Matifat and Camusot--(for they will go shares)--that
Matifat and Camusot are proprietors of a review, the newspapers will be
full of friendly notices of Florine and Coralie. Florine's name will be
made; she will perhaps obtain an engagement in another theatre with a
salary of twelve thousand francs. In fact, Matifat will save a thousand
francs every month in dinners and presents to journalists. You know
nothing of men, nor of the way things are managed."

"Poor man!" said Lucien, "he is looking forward to an evening's
pleasure."

"And
he will be sawn in two with arguments until Florine sees Finot's
receipt for a sixth share of the paper. And to-morrow I shall be editor
of Finot's paper, and making a thousand francs a month. The end of my
troubles is in sight!" cried Florine's lover.

Lousteau
went out, and Lucien sat like one bewildered, lost in the infinite of
thought, soaring above this everyday world. In the Wooden Galleries he
had seen the wires by which the trade in books is moved; he has seen
something of the kitchen where great reputations are made; he had been
behind the scenes; he had seen the seamy side of life, the consciences
of men involved in the machinery of Paris, the mechanism of it all. As
he watched Florine on the stage he almost envied Lousteau his good
fortune; already, for a few moments he had forgotten Matifat in the
background. He was not left alone for long, perhaps for not more than
five minutes, but those minutes seemed an eternity.

Thoughts
rose within him that set his soul on fire, as the spectacle on the
stage had heated his senses. He looked at the women with their wanton
eyes, all the brighter for the red paint on their cheeks, at the
gleaming bare necks, the luxuriant forms outlined by the lascivious
folds of the basquina, the very short skirts, that displayed as much as
possible of limbs encased in scarlet stockings with green clocks to
them--a disquieting vision for the pit.

A double process of
corruption was working within him in parallel lines, like two channels
that will spread sooner or later in flood time and make one. That
corruption was eating into Lucien's soul, as he leaned back in his
corner, staring vacantly at the curtain, one arm resting on the crimson
velvet cushion, and his hand drooping over the edge. He felt the
fascination of the life that was offered to him, of the gleams of light
among its clouds; and this so much the more keenly because it shone out
like a blaze of fireworks against the blank darkness of his own
obscure, monotonous days of toil.

Suddenly his listless eyes
became aware of a burning glance that reached him through a rent in the
curtain, and roused him from his lethargy. Those were Coralie's eyes
that glowed upon him. He lowered his head and looked across at Camusot,
who just then entered the opposite box.

That amateur was a
worthy silk-mercer of the Rue des Bourdonnais, stout and substantial, a
judge in the commercial court, a father of four children, and the
husband of a second wife. At the age of fifty-six, with a cap of gray
hair on his head, he had the smug appearance of a man who has his
eighty thousand francs of income; and having been forced to put up with
a good deal that he did not like in the way of business, has fully made
up his mind to enjoy the rest of his life, and not to quit this earth
until he has had his share of cakes and ale. A brow the color of fresh
butter and florid cheeks like a monk's jowl seemed scarcely big enough
to contain his exuberant jubilation. Camusot had left his wife at home,
and they were applauding Coralie to the skies. All the rich man's
citizen vanity was summed up and gratified in Coralie; in Coralie's
lodging he gave himself the airs of a great lord of a bygone day; now,
at this moment, he felt that half of her success was his; the knowledge
that he had paid for it confirmed him in this idea. Camusot's conduct
was sanctioned by the presence of his father-in-law, a little old fogy
with powdered hair and leering eyes, highly respected nevertheless.

Again
Lucien felt disgust rising within him. He thought of the year when he
loved Mme. de Bargeton with an exalted and disinterested love; and at
that thought love, as a poet understands it, spread its white wings
about him; countless memories drew a circle of distant blue horizon
about the great man of Angouleme, and again he fell to dreaming.

Up went the curtain, and there stood Coralie and Florine upon the stage.

"He
is thinking about as much of you as of the Grand Turk, my dear girl,"
Florine said in an aside while Coralie was finishing her speech.

Lucien
could not help laughing. He looked at Coralie. She was one of the most
charming and captivating actresses in Paris, rivaling Mme. Perrin and
Mlle. Fleuriet, and destined likewise to share their fate. Coralie was
a woman of a type that exerts at will a power of fascination over men.
With an oval face of deep ivory tint, a mouth red as a pomegranate, and
a chin subtly delicate in its contour as the edge of a porcelain cup,
Coralie was a Jewess of the sublime type. The jet black eyes behind
their curving lashes seemed to scorch her eyelids; you could guess how
soft they might grow, or how sparks of the heat of the desert might
flash from them in response to a summons from within. The circles of
olive shadow about them were bounded by thick arching lines of eyebrow.
Magnificent mental power, well-nigh amounting to genius, seemed to
dwell in the swarthy forehead beneath the double curve of ebony hair
that lay upon it like a crown, and gleamed in the light like a
varnished surface; but like many another actress, Coralie had little
wit in spite of her aptness at greenroom repartee, and scarcely any
education in spite of her boudoir experience. Her brain was prompted by
her senses, her kindness was the impulsive warm-heartedness of girls of
her class. But who could trouble over Coralie's psychology when his
eyes were dazzled by those smooth, round arms of hers, the
spindle-shaped fingers, the fair white shoulders, and breast celebrated
in the Song of Songs, the flexible curving lines of throat, the
graciously moulded outlines beneath the scarlet silk stockings? And
this beauty, worthy of an Eastern poet, was brought into relief by the
conventional Spanish costume of the stage. Coralie was the delight of
the pit; all eyes dwelt on the outlines moulded by the clinging folds
of her bodice, and lingered over the Andalusian contour of the hips
from which her skirt hung, fluttering wantonly with every movement. To
Lucien, watching this creature, who played for him alone, caring no
more for Camusot than a street-boy in the gallery cares for an
apple-paring, there came a moment when he set desire above love, and
enjoyment above desire, and the demon of Lust stirred strange thoughts
in him.

"I know nothing of the love that wallows in luxury and
wine and sensual pleasure," he said within himself. "I have lived more
with ideas than with realities. You must pass through all experience if
you mean to render all experience. This will be my first great supper,
my first orgy in a new and strange world; why should I not know, for
once, the delights which the great lords of the eighteenth century
sought so eagerly of wantons of the Opera? Must one not first learn of
courtesans and actresses the delights, the perfections, the transports,
the resources, the subtleties of love, if only to translate them
afterwards into the regions of a higher love than this? And what is all
this, after all, but the poetry of the senses? Two months ago these
women seemed to me to be goddesses guarded by dragons that no one dared
approach; I was envying Lousteau just now, but here is another
handsomer than Florine; why should I not profit by her fancy, when the
greatest nobles buy a night with such women with their richest
treasures? When ambassadors set foot in these depths, they fling aside
all thought of yesterday or to-morrow. I should be a fool to be more
squeamish than princes, especially as I love no one as yet."

Lucien
had quite forgotten Camusot. To Lousteau he had expressed the utmost
disgust for this most hateful of all partitions, and now he himself had
sunk to the same level, and, carried away by the casuistry of his
vehement desire, had given the reins to his fancy.

"Coralie is
raving about you," said Lousteau as he came in. "Your countenance,
worthy of the greatest Greek sculptors, has worked unutterable havoc
behind the scenes. You are in luck my dear boy. Coralie is eighteen
years old, and in a few days' time she may be making sixty thousand
francs a year by her beauty. She is an honest girl still. Since her
mother sold her three years ago for sixty thousand francs, she has
tried to find happiness, and found nothing but annoyance. She took to
the stage in a desperate mood; she has a horror of her first purchaser,
de Marsay; and when she came out of the galleys, for the king of
dandies soon dropped her, she picked up old Camusot. She does not care
much about him, but he is like a father to her, and she endures him and
his love. Several times already she has refused the handsomest
proposals; she is faithful to Camusot, who lets her live in peace. So
you are her first love. The first sight of you went to her heart like a
pistol-shot, Florine has gone to her dressing-room to bring the girl to
reason. She is crying over your cruelty; she has forgotten her part,
the play will go to pieces, and good-day to the engagement at the
Gymnase which Camusot had planned for her."

"Pooh! . . . Poor
thing!" said Lucien. Every instinct of vanity was tickled by the words;
he felt his heart swell high with self-conceit. "More adventures have
befallen me in this one evening, my dear fellow, than in all the first
eighteen years of my life." And Lucien related the history of his love
affairs with Mme. de Bargeton, and of the cordial hatred he bore the
Baron du Chatelet.

"Stay though! the newspaper wants a _bete
noire_; we will take him up. The Baron is a buck of the Empire and a
Ministerialist; he is the man for us; I have seen him many a time at
the Opera. I can see your great lady as I sit here; she is often in the
Marquise d'Espard's box. The Baron is paying court to your lady love, a
cuttlefish bone that she is. Wait! Finot has just sent a special
messenger round to say that they are short of copy at the office. Young
Hector Merlin has left them in the lurch because they did not pay for
white lines. Finot, in despair, is knocking off an article against the
Opera. Well now, my dear fellow, you can do this play; listen to it and
think it over, and I will go to the manager's office and think out
three columns about your man and your disdainful fair one. They will be
in no pleasant predicament to-morrow."

"So this is how a newspaper is written?" said Lucien.

"It
is always like this," answered Lousteau. "These ten months that I have
been a journalist, they have always run short of copy at eight o'clock
in the evening."

Manuscript sent to the printer is spoken of as
"copy," doubtless because the writers are supposed to send in a fair
copy of their work; or possibly the word is ironically derived from the
Latin word _copia_, for copy is invariably scarce.

"We always
mean to have a few numbers ready in advance, a grand idea that will
never be realized," continued Lousteau. "It is ten o'clock, you see,
and not a line has been written. I shall ask Vernou and Nathan for a
score of epigrams on deputies, or on 'Chancellor Cruzoe,' or on the
Ministry, or on friends of ours if it needs must be. A man in this pass
would slaughter his parent, just as a privateer will load his guns with
silver pieces taken out of the booty sooner than perish. Write a
brilliant article, and you will make brilliant progress in Finot's
estimation; for Finot has a lively sense of benefits to come, and that
sort of gratitude is better than any kind of pledge, pawntickets always
excepted, for they invariably represent something solid."

"What kind of men can journalists be? Are you to sit down at a table
and be witty to order?"

"Just exactly as a lamp begins to burn when you apply a match--so long
as there is any oil in it."

Lousteau's hand was on the lock when du Bruel came in with the manager.

"Permit
me, monsieur, to take a message to Coralie; allow me to tell her that
you will go home with her after supper, or my play will be ruined. The
wretched girl does not know what she is doing or saying; she will cry
when she ought to laugh and laugh when she ought to cry. She has been
hissed once already. You can still save the piece, and, after all,
pleasure is not a misfortune."

"I am not accustomed to rivals, sir," Lucien answered.

"Pray
don't tell her that!" cried the manager. "Coralie is just the girl to
fling Camusot overboard and ruin herself in good earnest. The
proprietor of the _Golden Cocoon_, worthy man, allows her two thousand
francs a month, and pays for all her dresses and _claqueurs_."

"But don't look as if you meant to snub that charming creature,"
pleaded du Bruel.

"Dear me! am I to write the notice of your play and smile on your
heroine as well?" exclaimed the poet.

The
author vanished with a signal to Coralie, who began to act forthwith in
a marvelous way. Vignol, who played the part of the alcalde, and
revealed for the first time his genius as an actor of old men, came
forward amid a storm of applause to make an announcement to the house.

"The piece which we have the honor of playing for you this evening,
gentlemen, is the work of MM. Raoul and de Cursy."

"Coralie_!
Coralie_!" shouted the enraptured house. "Florine, too!" roared a voice
of thunder from the opposite box, and other voices took up the cry,
"Florine and Coralie!"

The curtain rose, Vignol reappeared
between the two actresses; Matifat and Camusot flung wreaths on the
stage, and Coralie stooped for her flowers and held them out to Lucien.

For
him those two hours spent in the theatre seemed to be a dream. The
spell that held him had begun to work when he went behind the scenes;
and, in spite of its horrors, the atmosphere of the place, its
sensuality and dissolute morals had affected the poet's still untainted
nature. A sort of malaria that infects the soul seems to lurk among
those dark, filthy passages filled with machinery, and lit with smoky,
greasy lamps. The solemnity and reality of life disappear, the most
sacred things are matter for a jest, the most impossible things seem to
be true. Lucien felt as if he had taken some narcotic, and Coralie had
completed the work. He plunged into this joyous intoxication.

The
lights in the great chandelier were extinguished; there was no one left
in the house except the boxkeepers, busy taking away footstools and
shutting doors, the noises echoing strangely through the empty theatre.
The footlights, blown out as one candle, sent up a fetid reek of smoke.
The curtain rose again, a lantern was lowered from the ceiling, and
firemen and stage carpenters departed on their rounds. The fairy scenes
of the stage, the rows of fair faces in the boxes, the dazzling lights,
the magical illusion of new scenery and costume had all disappeared,
and dismal darkness, emptiness, and cold reigned in their stead. It was
hideous. Lucien sat on in bewilderment.

"Well! are you coming, my boy?" Lousteau's voice called from the stage.
"Jump down."

Lucien
sprang over. He scarcely recognized Florine and Coralie in their
ordinary quilted paletots and cloaks, with their faces hidden by hats
and thick black veils. Two butterflies returned to the chrysalis stage
could not be more completely transformed.

"Will you honor me by giving me your arm?" Coralie asked tremulously.

"With
pleasure," said Lucien. He could feel the beating of her heart
throbbing against his like some snared bird as she nestled closely to
his side, with something of the delight of a cat that rubs herself
against her master with eager silken caresses.

"So we are supping together!" she said.

The
party of four found two cabs waiting for them at the door in the Rue
des Fosses-du-Temple. Coralie drew Lucien to one of the two, in which
Camusot and his father-in-law old Cardot were seated already. She
offered du Bruel a fifth place, and the manager drove off with Florine,
Matifat, and Lousteau.

"These hackney cabs are abominable things," said Coralie.

"Why don't you have a carriage?" returned du Bruel.

"_Why_?"
she asked pettishly. "I do not like to tell you before M. Cardot's
face; for he trained his son-in-law, no doubt. Would you believe it,
little and old as he is, M. Cardot only gives Florine five hundred
francs a month, just about enough to pay for her rent and her grub and
her clothes. The old Marquis de Rochegude offered me a brougham two
months ago, and he has six hundred thousand francs a year, but I am an
artist and not a common hussy."

"You shall have a carriage the day after to-morrow, miss," said Camusot
benignly; "you never asked me for one."

"As
if one _asked_ for such a thing as that? What! you love a woman and let
her paddle about in the mud at the risk of breaking her legs? Nobody
but a knight of the yardstick likes to see a draggled skirt hem."

As
she uttered the sharp words that cut Camusot to the quick, she groped
for Lucien's knee, and pressed it against her own, and clasped her
fingers upon his hand. She was silent. All her power to feel seemed to
be concentrated upon the ineffable joy of a moment which brings
compensation for the whole wretched past of a life such as these poor
creatures lead, and develops within their souls a poetry of which other
women, happily ignorant of these violent revulsions, know nothing.

"You played like Mlle. Mars herself towards the end," said du Bruel.

"Yes,"
said Camusot, "something put her out at the beginning; but from the
middle of the second act to the very end, she was enough to drive you
wild with admiration. Half of the success of your play was due to her."

"And half of her success is due to me," said du Bruel.

"This
is all much ado about nothing," said Coralie in an unfamiliar voice.
And, seizing an opportunity in the darkness, she carried Lucien's hand
to her lips and kissed it and drenched it with tears. Lucien felt
thrilled through and through by that touch, for in the humility of the
courtesan's love there is a magnificence which might set an example to
angels.

"Oh! do us that little service!" pleaded
Camusot, down on his knees, metaphorically speaking, before the critic.
"You will always find me ready to do you a good turn at any time."

"Do
leave him his independence," Coralie exclaimed angrily; "he will write
what he pleases. Papa Camusot, buy carriages for me instead of praises."

"You
shall have them on very easy terms," Lucien answered politely. "I have
never written for newspapers before, so I am not accustomed to their
ways, my maiden pen is at your disposal----"

"That is funny," said du Bruel.

"Here we are in the Rue de Bondy," said Cardot. Coralie's sally had
quite crushed the little old man.

"If
you are giving me the first fruits of your pen, the first love that has
sprung up in my heart shall be yours," whispered Coralie in the brief
instant that they remained alone together in the cab; then she went up
to Florine's bedroom to change her dress for a toilette previously sent.

Lucien
had no idea how lavishly a prosperous merchant will spend money upon an
actress or a mistress when he means to enjoy a life of pleasure.
Matifat was not nearly so rich a man as his friend Camusot, and he had
done his part rather shabbily, yet the sight of the dining-room took
Lucien by surprise. The walls were hung with green cloth with a border
of gilded nails, the whole room was artistically decorated, lighted by
handsome lamps, stands full of flowers stood in every direction. The
drawing-room was resplendent with the furniture in fashion in those
days--a Thomire chandelier, a carpet of Eastern design, and yellow
silken hangings relieved by a brown border. The candlesticks,
fire-irons, and clock were all in good taste; for Matifat had left
everything to Grindot, a rising architect, who was building a house for
him, and the young man had taken great pains with the rooms when he
knew that Florine was to occupy them.

Matifat, a tradesman to
the backbone, went about carefully, afraid to touch the new furniture;
he seemed to have the totals of the bills always before his eyes, and
to look upon the splendors about him as so much jewelry imprudently
withdrawn from the case.

"And I shall be obliged to do as much for Florentine!" old Cardot's
eyes seemed to say.

Lucien
at once began to understand Lousteau's indifference to the state of his
garret. Etienne was the real king of these festivals; Etienne enjoyed
the use of all these fine things. He was standing just now on the
hearthrug with his back to the fire, as if he were the master of the
house, chatting with the manager, who was congratulating du Bruel.

"Copy,
copy!" called Finot, coming into the room. "There is nothing in the
box; the printers are setting up my article, and they will soon have
finished."

"We will manage," said Etienne. "There is a fire
burning in Florine's boudoir; there is a table there; and if M. Matifat
will find us paper and ink, we will knock off the newspaper while
Florine and Coralie are dressing."

Cardot, Camusot, and Matifat
disappeared in search of quills, penknives, and everything necessary.
Suddenly the door was flung open, and Tullia, one of the prettiest
opera-dancers of the day, dashed into the room.

"They agree to
take the hundred copies, dear boy!" she cried, addressing Finot; "they
won't cost the management anything, for the chorus and the orchestra
and the _corps de ballet_ are to take them whether they like it or not;
but your paper is so clever that nobody will grumble. And you are going
to have your boxes. Here is the subscription for the first quarter,"
she continued, holding out a couple of banknotes; "so don't cut me up!"

"It is all over with me!" groaned Finot; "I must suppress my abominable
diatribe, and I haven't another notion in my head."

"What
a happy inspiration, divine Lais!" exclaimed Blondet, who had followed
the lady upstairs and brought Nathan, Vernou and Claude Vignon with
him. "Stop to supper, there is a dear, or I will crush thee, butterfly
as thou art. There will be no professional jealousies, as you are a
dancer; and as to beauty, you have all of you too much sense to show
jealousy in public."

"Very
well; Nathan, Vernou, and du Bruel will make the jokes at the end; and
Blondet, good fellow, surely will vouchsafe a couple of short columns
for the first sheet. I will run round to the printer. It is lucky that
you brought your carriage, Tullia."

"Yes, but the Duke is waiting below in it, and he has a German Minister
with him."

"Ask the Duke and the Minister to come up," said Nathan.

"A
German? They are the ones to drink, and they listen too; he shall hear
some astonishing things to send home to his Government," cried Blondet.

"Is
there any sufficiently serious personage to go down to speak to him?"
asked Finot. "Here, du Bruel, you are an official; bring up the Duc de
Rhetore and the Minister, and give your arm to Tullia. Dear me! Tullia,
how handsome you are to-night!"

"We shall be thirteen at table!" exclaimed Matifat, paling visibly.

"No,
fourteen," said a voice in the doorway, and Florentine appeared. "I
have come to look after 'milord Cardot,'" she added, speaking with a
burlesque English accent.

"And besides," said Lousteau, "Claude Vignon came with Blondet."

"I
brought him here to drink," returned Blondet, taking up an inkstand.
"Look here, all of you, you must use all your wit before those
fifty-six bottles of wine drive it out. And, of all things, stir up du
Bruel; he is a vaudevillist, he is capable of making bad jokes if you
get him to concert pitch."

And Lucien wrote his first newspaper
article at the round table in Florine's boudoir, by the light of the
pink candles lighted by Matifat; before such a remarkable audience he
was eager to show what he could do.

THE PANORAMA-DRAMATIQUE.

First performance of the _Alcalde in a Fix_, an imbroglio in three
acts.--First appearance of Mademoiselle Florine.--Mademoiselle
Coralie.--Vignol.

People are coming and going, walking and
talking, everybody is looking for something, nobody finds anything.
General hubbub. The Alcalde has lost his daughter and found his cap,
but the cap does not fit; it must belong to some thief. Where is the
thief? People walk and talk, and come and go more than ever. Finally
the Alcalde finds a man without his daughter, and his daughter without
the man, which is satisfactory for the magistrate, but not for the
audience. Quiet being resorted, the Alcalde tries to examine the man.
Behold a venerable Alcalde, sitting in an Alcalde's great armchair,
arranging the sleeves of his Alcalde's gown. Only in Spain do Alcaldes
cling to their enormous sleeves and wear plaited lawn ruffles about the
magisterial throat, a good half of an Alcalde's business on the stage
in Paris. This particular Alcalde, wheezing and waddling about like an
asthmatic old man, is Vignol, on whom Potier's mantle has fallen; a
young actor who personates old age so admirably that the oldest men in
the audience cannot help laughing. With that quavering voice of his,
that bald forehead, and those spindle shanks trembling under the weight
of a senile frame, he may look forward to a long career of decrepitude.
There is something alarming about the young actor's old age; he is so
very old; you feel nervous lest senility should be infectious. And what
an admirable Alcalde he makes! What a delightful, uneasy smile! what
pompous stupidity! what wooden dignity! what judicial hesitation! How
well the man knows that black may be white, or white black! How
eminently well he is fitted to be Minister to a constitutional monarch!
The stranger answers every one of his inquiries by a question; Vignol
retorts in such a fashion, that the person under examination elicits
all the truth from the Alcalde. This piece of pure comedy, with a
breath of Moliere throughout, puts the house in good humor. The people
on the stage all seemed to understand what they were about, but I am
quite unable to clear up the mystery, or to say wherein it lay; for the
Alcalde's daughter was there, personified by a living, breathing
Andalusian, a Spaniard with a Spaniard's eyes, a Spaniard's complexion,
a Spaniard's gait and figure, a Spaniard from top to toe, with her
poniard in her garter, love in her heart, and a cross on the ribbon
about her neck. When the act was over, and somebody asked me how the
piece was going, I answered, "She wears scarlet stockings with green
clocks to them; she has a little foot, no larger than _that_, in her
patent leather shoes, and the prettiest pair of ankles in Andalusia!"
Oh! that Alcalde's daughter brings your heart into your mouth; she
tantalizes you so horribly, that you long to spring upon the stage and
offer her your thatched hovel and your heart, or thirty thousand livres
per annum and your pen. The Andalusian is the loveliest actress in
Paris. Coralie, for she must be called by her real name, can be a
countess or a _grisette_, and in which part she would be more charming
one cannot tell. She can be anything that she chooses; she is born to
achieve all possibilities; can more be said of a boulevard actress?

With the second act, a Parisian Spaniard appeared upon the scene, with
her features cut like a cameo and her dangerous eyes. "Where does she
come from?" I asked in my turn, and was told that she came from the
greenroom, and that she was Mademoiselle Florine; but, upon my word, I
could not believe a syllable of it, such spirit was there in her
gestures, such frenzy in her love. She is the rival of the Alcalde's
daughter, and married to a grandee cut out to wear an Almaviva's cloak,
with stuff sufficient in it for a hundred boulevard noblemen. Mlle.
Florine wore neither scarlet stockings with green clocks, nor patent
leather shoes, but she appeared in a mantilla, a veil which she put to
admirable uses, like the great lady that she is! She showed to
admiration that the tigress can be a cat. I began to understand, from
the sparkling talk between the two, that some drama of jealousy was
going on; and just as everything was put right, the Alcalde's stupidity
embroiled everybody again. Torchbearers, rich men, footmen, Figaros,
grandees, alcaldes, dames, and damsels--the whole company on the stage
began to eddy about, and come and go, and look for one another. The
plot thickened, again I left it to thicken; for Florine the jealous and
the happy Coralie had entangled me once more in the folds of mantilla
and basquina, and their little feet were twinkling in my eyes.

I managed, however, to reach the third act without any mishap. The
commissary of police was not compelled to interfere, and I did nothing
to scandalize the house, wherefore I begin to believe in the influence
of that "public and religious morality," about which the Chamber of
Deputies is so anxious, that any one might think there was no morality
left in France. I even contrived to gather that a man was in love with
two women who failed to return his affection, or else that two women
were in love with a man who loved neither of them; the man did not love
the Alcalde, or the Alcalde had no love for the man, who was
nevertheless a gallant gentleman, and in love with somebody, with
himself, perhaps, or with heaven, if the worst came to the worst, for
he becomes a monk. And if you want to know any more, you can go to the
Panorama-Dramatique. You are hereby given fair warning--you must go
once to accustom yourself to those irresistible scarlet stockings with
the green clocks, to little feet full of promises, to eyes with a ray
of sunlight shining through them, to the subtle charm of a Parisienne
disguised as an Andalusian girl, and of an Andalusian masquerading as a
Parisienne. You must go a second time to enjoy the play, to shed tears
over the love-distracted grandee, and die of laughing at the old
Alcalde. The play is twice a success. The author, who writes it, it is
said, in collaboration with one of the great poets of the day, was
called before the curtain, and appeared with a love-distraught damsel
on each arm, and fairly brought down the excited house. The two dancers
seemed to have more wit in their legs than the author himself; but when
once the fair rivals left the stage, the dialogue seemed witty at once,
a triumphant proof of the excellence of the piece. The applause and
calls for the author caused the architect some anxiety; but M. de
Cursy, the author, being accustomed to volcanic eruptions of the
reeling Vesuvius beneath the chandelier, felt no tremor. As for the
actresses, they danced the famous bolero of Seville, which once found
favor in the sight of a council of reverend fathers, and escaped
ecclesiastical censure in spite of its wanton dangerous grace. The
bolero in itself would be enough to attract old age while there is any
lingering heat of youth in the veins, and out of charity I warn these
persons to keep the lenses of their opera-glasses well polished.

While Lucien was writing a column which was to set a new fashion in
journalism and reveal a fresh and original gift, Lousteau indited an
article of the kind described as _moeurs_--a sketch of contemporary
manners, entitled _The Elderly Beau_.

"The buck of the Empire,"
he wrote, "is invariably long, slender, and well preserved. He wears a
corset and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. His name was originally
Potelet, or something very like it; but to stand well with the Court,
he conferred a _du_ upon himself, and _du_ Potelet he is until another
revolution. A baron of the Empire, a man of two ends, as his name
(_Potelet_, a post) implies, he is paying his court to the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, after a youth gloriously and usefully spent as the
agreeable trainbearer of a sister of the man whom decency forbids me to
mention by name. Du Potelet has forgotten that he was once in waiting
upon Her Imperial Highness; but he still sings the songs composed for
the benefactress who took such a tender interest in his career," and so
forth and so forth. It was a tissue of personalities, silly enough for
the most part, such as they used to write in those days. Other papers,
and notably the _Figaro_, have brought the art to a curious perfection
since. Lousteau compared the Baron to a heron, and introduced Mme. de
Bargeton, to whom he was paying his court, as a cuttlefish bone, a
burlesque absurdity which amused readers who knew neither of the
personages. A tale of the loves of the Heron, who tried in vain to
swallow the Cuttlefish bone, which broke into three pieces when he
dropped it, was irresistibly ludicrous. Everybody remembers the
sensation which the pleasantry made in the Faubourg Saint-Germain; it
was the first of a series of similar articles, and was one of the
thousand and one causes which provoked the rigorous press legislation
of Charles X.

An hour later, Blondet, Lousteau, and Lucien came
back to the drawing-room, where the other guests were chatting. The
Duke was there and the Minister, the four women, the three merchants,
the manager, and Finot. A printer's devil, with a paper cap on his
head, was waiting even then for copy.

"The men are just going off, if I have nothing to take them," he said.

"Stay a bit, here are ten francs, and tell them to wait," said Finot.

"If I give them the money, sir, they would take to tippleography, and
good-night to the newspaper."

"That
boy's common-sense is appalling to me," remarked Finot; and the
Minister was in the middle of a prediction of a brilliant future for
the urchin, when the three came in. Blondet read aloud an extremely
clever article against the Romantics; Lousteau's paragraph drew
laughter, and by the Duc de Rhetore's advice an indirect eulogium of
Mme. d'Espard was slipped in, lest the whole Faubourg Saint-Germain
should take offence.

"What have _you_ written?" asked Finot, turning to Lucien.

And
Lucien read, quaking for fear, but the room rang with applause when he
finished; the actresses embraced the neophyte; and the two merchants,
following suit, half choked the breath out of him. There were tears in
du Bruel's eyes as he grasped his critic's hand, and the manager
invited him to dinner.

"There are no children nowadays," said
Blondet. "Since M. de Chateaubriand called Victor Hugo a 'sublime
child,' I can only tell you quite simply that you have spirit and
taste, and write like a gentleman."

"He is on the newspaper," said Finot, as he thanked Etienne, and gave
him a shrewd glance.

"What jokes have you made?" inquired Lousteau, turning to Blondet and
du Bruel.

*** An Ultra, condemning M. Pasquier's
speech, said his programme was only a continuation of Decaze's policy.
"Yes," said a lady, "but he stands on a Monarchical basis, he has just
the kind of leg for a Court suit."

"With such a beginning, I
don't ask more of you," said Finot; "it will be all right.--Run round
with this," he added, turning to the boy; "the paper is not exactly a
genuine article, but it is our best number yet," and he turned to the
group of writers. Already Lucien's colleagues were privately taking his
measure.

"That fellow has brains," said Blondet.

"His article is well written," said Claude Vignon.

"Supper!" cried Matifat.

The
Duke gave his arm to Florine, Coralie went across to Lucien, and Tullia
went in to supper between Emile Blondet and the German Minister.

"I
cannot understand why you are making an onslaught on Mme. de Bargeton
and the Baron du Chatelet; they say that he is prefect-designate of the
Charente, and will be Master of Requests some day."

"Mme. de Bargeton showed Lucien the door as if he had been an
imposter," said Lousteau.

"Such a fine young fellow!" exclaimed the Minister.

Supper,
served with new plate, Sevres porcelain, and white damask, was redolent
of opulence. The dishes were from Chevet, the wines from a celebrated
merchant on the Quai Saint-Bernard, a personal friend of Matifat's. For
the first time Lucien beheld the luxury of Paris displayed; he went
from surprise to surprise, but he kept his astonishment to himself,
like a man who had spirit and taste and wrote like a gentleman, as
Blondet had said.

As they crossed the drawing-room, Coralie bent
to Florine, "Make Camusot so drunk that he will be compelled to stop
here all night," she whispered.

"So you have hooked your journalist, have you?" returned Florine, using
the idiom of women of her class.

"No, dear; I love him," said Coralie, with an adorable little shrug of
the shoulders.

Those
words rang in Lucien's ears, borne to them by the fifth deadly sin.
Coralie was perfectly dressed. Every woman possesses some personal
charm in perfection, and Coralie's toilette brought her characteristic
beauty into prominence. Her dress, moreover, like Florine's, was of
some exquisite stuff, unknown as yet to the public, a _mousseline de
soie_, with which Camusot had been supplied a few days before the rest
of the world; for, as owner of the _Golden Cocoon_, he was a kind of
Providence in Paris to the Lyons silkweavers.

Love and toilet
are like color and perfume for a woman, and Coralie in her happiness
looked lovelier than ever. A looked-for delight which cannot elude the
grasp possesses an immense charm for youth; perhaps in their eyes the
secret of the attraction of a house of pleasure lies in the certainty
of gratification; perhaps many a long fidelity is attributable to the
same cause. Love for love's sake, first love indeed, had blent with one
of the strange violent fancies which sometimes possess these poor
creatures; and love and admiration of Lucien's great beauty taught
Coralie to express the thoughts in her heart.

"I should love you if you were ill and ugly," she whispered as they sat
down.

What
a saying for a poet! Camusot utterly vanished, Lucien had forgotten his
existence, he saw Coralie, and had eyes for nothing else. How should he
draw back--this creature, all sensation, all enjoyment of life, tired
of the monotony of existence in a country town, weary of poverty,
harassed by enforced continence, impatient of the claustral life of the
Rue de Cluny, of toiling without reward? The fascination of the under
world of Paris was upon him; how should he rise and leave this
brilliant gathering? Lucien stood with one foot in Coralie's chamber
and the other in the quicksands of Journalism. After so much vain
search, and climbing of so many stairs, after standing about and
waiting in the Rue de Sentier, he had found Journalism a jolly boon
companion, joyous over the wine. His wrongs had just been avenged.
There were two for whom he had vainly striven to fill the cup of
humiliation and pain which he had been made to drink to the dregs, and
now to-morrow they should receive a stab in their very hearts. "Here is
a real friend!" he thought, as he looked at Lousteau. It never crossed
his mind that Lousteau already regarded him as a dangerous rival. He
had made a blunder; he had done his very best when a colorless article
would have served him admirably well. Blondet's remark to Finot that it
would be better to come to terms with a man of that calibre, had
counteracted Lousteau's gnawing jealousy. He reflected that it would be
prudent to keep on good terms with Lucien, and, at the same time, to
arrange with Finot to exploit this formidable newcomer--he must be kept
in poverty. The decision was made in a moment, and the bargain made in
a few whispered words.

"He has talent."

"He will want the more."

"Ah?"

"Good!"

"A
supper among French journalists always fills me with dread," said the
German diplomatist, with serene urbanity; he looked as he spoke at
Blondet, whom he had met at the Comtesse de Montcornet's. "It is laid
upon you, gentlemen, to fulfil a prophecy of Blucher's."

"What prophecy?" asked Nathan.

"When
Blucher and Sacken arrived on the heights of Montmartre in 1814 (pardon
me, gentlemen, for recalling a day unfortunate for France), Sacken (a
rough brute), remarked, 'Now we will set Paris alight!' --'Take very
good care that you don't,' said Blucher. 'France will die of _that_,
nothing else can kill her,' and he waved his hand over the glowing,
seething city, that lay like a huge canker in the valley of the
Seine.--There are no journalists in our country, thank Heaven!"
continued the Minister after a pause. "I have not yet recovered from
the fright that the little fellow gave me, a boy of ten, in a paper
cap, with the sense of an old diplomatist. And to-night I feel as if I
were supping with lions and panthers, who graciously sheathe their
claws in my honor."

"It is clear," said Blondet, "that we are at
liberty to inform Europe that a serpent dropped from your Excellency's
lips this evening, and that the venomous creature failed to inoculate
Mlle. Tullia, the prettiest dancer in Paris; and to follow up the story
with a commentary on Eve, and the Scriptures, and the first and last
transgression. But have no fear, you are our guest."

"It would be funny," said Finot.

"We
would begin with a scientific treatise on all the serpents found in the
human heart and human body, and so proceed to the _corps
diplomatique_," said Lousteau.

"And we could exhibit one in spirits, in a bottle of brandied
cherries," said Vernou.

"Till you yourself would end by believing in the story," added Vignon,
looking at the diplomatist.

"Gentlemen," cried the Duc de Rhetore, "let sleeping claws lie."

"The
influence and power of the press is only dawning," said Finot.
"Journalism is in its infancy; it will grow. In ten years' time,
everything will be brought into publicity. The light of thought will be
turned on all subjects, and----"

"The blight of thought will be over it all," corrected Blondet.

"Here is an apothegm," cried Claude Vignon.

"Thought will make kings," said Lousteau.

"And undo monarchs," said the German.

"And
therefore," said Blondet, "if the press did not exist, it would be
necessary to invent it forthwith. But here we have it, and live by it."

"You
will die of it," returned the German diplomatist. "Can you not see that
if you enlighten the masses, and raise them in the political scale, you
make it all the harder for the individual to rise above their level?
Can you not see that if you sow the seeds of reasoning among the
working-classes, you will reap revolt, and be the first to fall
victims? What do they smash in Paris when a riot begins?"

"The street-lamps!" said Nathan; "but we are too modest to fear for
ourselves, we only run the risk of cracks."

"As
a nation, you have too much mental activity to allow any government to
run its course without interference. But for that, you would make the
conquest of Europe a second time, and win with the pen all that you
failed to keep with the sword."

"Journalism is an evil," said
Claude Vignon. "The evil may have its uses, but the present Government
is resolved to put it down. There will be a battle over it. Who will
give way? That is the question."

"The Government will give way,"
said Blondet. "I keep telling people that with all my might!
Intellectual power is _the_ great power in France; and the press has
more wit than all men of intellect put together, and the hypocrisy of
Tartufe besides."

"Blondet! Blondet! you are going too far!" called Finot. "Subscribers
are present."

"You
are the proprietor of one of those poison shops; you have reason to be
afraid; but I can laugh at the whole business, even if I live by it."

"Blondet
is right," said Claude Vignon. "Journalism, so far from being in the
hands of a priesthood, came to be first a party weapon, and then a
commercial speculation, carried on without conscience or scruple, like
other commercial speculations. Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a
shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade. If there
were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth plainly, morning and
evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility, and necessity of
deformity. A newspaper is not supposed to enlighten its readers, but to
supply them with congenial opinions. Give any newspaper time enough,
and it will be base, hypocritical, shameless, and treacherous; the
periodical press will be the death of ideas, systems, and individuals;
nay, it will flourish upon their decay. It will take the credit of all
creations of the brain; the harm that it does is done anonymously. We,
for instance--I, Claude Vignon; you, Blondet; you, Lousteau; and you,
Finot--we are all Platos, Aristides, and Catos, Plutarch's men, in
short; we are all immaculate; we may wash our hands of all iniquity.
Napoleon's sublime aphorism, suggested by his study of the Convention,
'No one individual is responsible for a crime committed collectively,'
sums up the whole significance of a phenomenon, moral or immoral,
whichever you please. However shamefully a newspaper may behave, the
disgrace attaches to no one person."

"The authorities will resort to repressive legislation," interposed du
Bruel. "A law is going to be passed, in fact."

"Pooh!"
retorted Nathan. "What is the law in France against the spirit in which
it is received, the most subtle of all solvents?"

"Ideas and
opinions can only be counteracted by opinions and ideas," Vignon
continued. "By sheer terror and despotism, and by no other means, can
you extinguish the genius of the French nation; for the language lends
itself admirably to allusion and ambiguity. Epigram breaks out the more
for repressive legislation; it is like steam in an engine without a
safety-valve.--The King, for example, does right; if a newspaper is
against him, the Minister gets all the credit of the measure, and _vice
versa_. A newspaper invents a scandalous libel--it has been
misinformed. If the victim complains, the paper gets off with an
apology for taking so great a freedom. If the case is taken into court,
the editor complains that nobody asked him to rectify the mistake; but
ask for redress, and he will laugh in your face and treat his offence
as a mere trifle. The paper scoffs if the victim gains the day; and if
heavy damages are awarded, the plaintiff is held up as an unpatriotic
obscurantist and a menace to the liberties of the country. In the
course of an article purporting to explain that Monsieur So-and-so is
as honest a man as you will find in the kingdom, you are informed that
he is not better than a common thief. The sins of the press? Pooh! mere
trifles; the curtailers of its liberties are monsters; and give him
time enough, the constant reader is persuaded to believe anything you
please. Everything which does not suit the newspaper will be
unpatriotic, and the press will be infallible. One religion will be
played off against another, and the Charter against the King. The press
will hold up the magistracy to scorn for meting out rigorous justice to
the press, and applaud its action when it serves the cause of party
hatred. The most sensational fictions will be invented to increase the
circulation; Journalism will descend to mountebanks' tricks worthy of
Bobeche; Journalism would serve up its father with the Attic salt of
its own wit sooner than fail to interest or amuse the public;
Journalism will outdo the actor who put his son's ashes into the urn to
draw real tears from his eyes, or the mistress who sacrifices
everything to her lover."

"Journalism is, in fact, the People in folio form," interrupted Blondet.

"The
people with hypocrisy added and generosity lacking," said Vignon. "All
real ability will be driven out from the ranks of Journalism, as
Aristides was driven into exile by the Athenians. We shall see
newspapers started in the first instance by men of honor, falling
sooner or later into the hands of men of abilities even lower than the
average, but endowed with the resistance of flexibility of
india-rubber, qualities denied to noble genius; nay, perhaps the future
newspaper proprietor will be the tradesman with capital sufficient to
buy venal pens. We see such things already indeed, but in ten years'
time every little youngster that has left school will take himself for
a great man, slash his predecessors from the lofty height of a
newspaper column, drag them down by the feet, and take their place.

"Napoleon
did wisely when he muzzled the press. I would wager that the Opposition
papers would batter down a government of their own setting up, just as
they are battering the present government, if any demand was refused.
The more they have, the more they will want in the way of concessions.
The _parvenu_ journalist will be succeeded by the starveling hack.
There is no salve for this sore. It is a kind of corruption which grows
more and more obtrusive and malignant; the wider it spreads, the more
patiently it will be endured, until the day comes when newspapers shall
so increase and multiply in the earth that confusion will be the
result--a second Babel. We, all of us, such as we are, have reason to
know that crowned kings are less ungrateful than kings of our
profession; that the most sordid man of business is not so mercenary
nor so keen in speculation; that our brains are consumed to furnish
their daily supply of poisonous trash. And yet we, all of us, shall
continue to write, like men who work in quicksilver mines, knowing that
they are doomed to die of their trade.

"Look there," he
continued, "at that young man sitting beside Coralie --what is his
name? Lucien! He has a beautiful face; he is a poet; and what is more,
he is witty--so much the better for him. Well, he will cross the
threshold of one of those dens where a man's intellect is prostituted;
he will put all his best and finest thought into his work; he will
blunt his intellect and sully his soul; he will be guilty of anonymous
meannesses which take the place of stratagem, pillage, and ratting to
the enemy in the warfare of _condottieri_. And when, like hundreds
more, he has squandered his genius in the service of others who find
the capital and do no work, those dealers in poisons will leave him to
starve if he is thirsty, and to die of thirst if he is starving."

"Thanks," said Finot.

"But,
dear me," continued Claude Vignon, "_I_ knew all this, yet here am I in
the galleys, and the arrival of another convict gives me pleasure. We
are cleverer, Blondet and I, than Messieurs This and That, who
speculate in our abilities, yet nevertheless we are always exploited by
them. We have a heart somewhere beneath the intellect; we have NOT the
grim qualities of the man who makes others work for him. We are
indolent, we like to look on at the game, we are meditative, and we are
fastidious; they will sweat our brains and blame us for improvidence."

"I thought you would be more amusing than this!" said Florine.

"Florine
is right," said Blondet; "let us leave the cure of public evils to
those quacks the statesmen. As Charlet says, 'Quarrel with my own bread
and butter? _Never_!'"

"Do you know what Vignon puts me in mind
of?" said Lousteau. "Of one of those fat women in the Rue du Pelican
telling a schoolboy, 'My boy, you are too young to come here.'"

A burst of laughter followed the sally, but it pleased Coralie. The
merchants meanwhile ate and drank and listened.

"What
a nation this is! You see so much good in it and so much evil," said
the Minister, addressing the Duc de Rhetore.--"You are prodigals who
cannot ruin yourselves, gentlemen."

And so, by the blessing of
chance, Lucien, standing on the brink of the precipice over which he
was destined to fall, heard warnings on all sides. D'Arthez had set him
on the right road, had shown him the noble method of work, and aroused
in him the spirit before which all obstacles disappear. Lousteau
himself (partly from selfish motives) had tried to warn him away by
describing Journalism and Literature in their practical aspects. Lucien
had refused to believe that there could be so much hidden corruption;
but now he had heard the journalists themselves crying woe for their
hurt, he had seen them at their work, had watched them tearing their
foster-mother's heart to read auguries of the future.

That
evening he had seen things as they are. He beheld the very heart's core
of corruption of that Paris which Blucher so aptly described; and so
far from shuddering at the sight, he was intoxicated with enjoyment of
the intellectually stimulating society in which he found himself.

These
extraordinary men, clad in armor damascened by their vices, these
intellects environed by cold and brilliant analysis, seemed so far
greater in his eyes than the grave and earnest members of the
brotherhood. And besides all this, he was reveling in his first taste
of luxury; he had fallen under the spell. His capricious instincts
awoke; for the first time in his life he drank exquisite wines, this
was his first experience of cookery carried to the pitch of a fine art.
A minister, a duke, and an opera-dancer had joined the party of
journalists, and wondered at their sinister power. Lucien felt a
horrible craving to reign over these kings, and he thought that he had
power to win his kingdom. Finally, there was this Coralie, made happy
by a few words of his. By the bright light of the wax-candles, through
the steam of the dishes and the fumes of wine, she looked sublimely
beautiful to his eyes, so fair had she grown with love. She was the
loveliest, the most beautiful actress in Paris. The brotherhood, the
heaven of noble thoughts, faded away before a temptation that appealed
to every fibre of his nature. How could it have been otherwise?
Lucien's author's vanity had just been gratified by the praises of
those who know; by the appreciation of his future rivals; the success
of his articles and his conquest of Coralie might have turned an older
head than his.

During the discussion, moreover, every one at
table had made a remarkably good supper, and such wines are not met
with every day. Lousteau, sitting beside Camusot, furtively poured
cherry-brandy several times into his neighbor's wineglass, and
challenged him to drink. And Camusot drank, all unsuspicious, for he
thought himself, in his own way, a match for a journalist. The jokes
became more personal when dessert appeared and the wine began to
circulate. The German Minister, a keen-witted man of the world, made a
sign to the Duke and Tullia, and the three disappeared with the first
symptoms of vociferous nonsense which precede the grotesque scenes of
an orgy in its final stage. Coralie and Lucien had been behaving like
children all the evening; as soon as the wine was uppermost in
Camusot's head, they made good their escape down the staircase and
sprang into a cab. Camusot subsided under the table; Matifat, looking
round for him, thought that he had gone home with Coralie, left his
guests to smoke, laugh, and argue, and followed Florine to her room.
Daylight surprised the party, or more accurately, the first dawn of
light discovered one man still able to speak, and Blondet, that
intrepid champion, was proposing to the assembled sleepers a health to
Aurora the rosy-fingered.

Lucien was unaccustomed to orgies of
this kind. His head was very tolerably clear as he came down the
staircase, but the fresh air was too much for him; he was horribly
drunk. When they reached the handsome house in the Rue de Vendome,
where the actress lived, Coralie and her waiting-woman were obliged to
assist the poet to climb to the first floor. Lucien was ignominiously
sick, and very nearly fainted on the staircase.

"Quick, Berenice, some tea! Make some tea," cried Coralie.

"It is nothing; it is the air," Lucien got out, "and I have never taken
so much before in my life."

"Poor
boy! He is as innocent as a lamb," said Berenice, a stalwart Norman
peasant woman as ugly as Coralie was pretty. Lucien, half unconscious,
was laid at last in bed. Coralie, with Berenice's assistance, undressed
the poet with all a mother's tender care.

"It is nothing," he murmured again and again. "It is the air. Thank
you, mamma."

"How charmingly he says 'mamma,'" cried Coralie, putting a kiss on his
hair.

"What
happiness to love such an angel, mademoiselle! Where did you pick him
up? I did not think a man could be as beautiful as you are," said
Berenice, when Lucien lay in bed. He was very drowsy; he knew nothing
and saw nothing; Coralie made him swallow several cups of tea, and left
him to sleep.

"Did the porter see us? Was there anyone else about?" she asked.

"No; I was sitting up for you."

"Does Victoire know anything?"

"Rather not!" returned Berenice.

Ten
hours later Lucien awoke to meet Coralie's eyes. She had watched by him
as he slept; he knew it, poet that he was. It was almost noon, but she
still wore the delicate dress, abominably stained, which she meant to
lay up as a relic. Lucien understood all the self-sacrifice and
delicacy of love, fain of its reward. He looked into Coralie's eyes. In
a moment she had flung off her clothing and slipped like a serpent to
Lucien's side.

At five o'clock in the afternoon Lucien was still
sleeping, cradled in this voluptuous paradise. He had caught glimpses
of Coralie's chamber, an exquisite creation of luxury, a world of
rose-color and white. He had admired Florine's apartments, but this
surpassed them in its dainty refinement.

Coralie had already
risen; for if she was to play her part as the Andalusian, she must be
at the theatre by seven o'clock. Yet she had returned to gaze at the
unconscious poet, lulled to sleep in bliss; she could not drink too
deeply of this love that rose to rapture, drawing close the bond
between the heart and the senses, to steep both in ecstasy. For in that
apotheosis of human passion, which of those that were twain on earth
that they might know bliss to the full creates one soul to rise to love
in heaven, lay Coralie's justification. Who, moreover, would not have
found excuse in Lucien's more than human beauty? To the actress
kneeling by the bedside, happy in love within her, it seemed that she
had received love's consecration. Berenice broke in upon Coralie's
rapture.

"Here comes Camusot!" cried the maid. "And he knows that you are here."

Lucien
sprang up at once. Innate generosity suggested that he was doing
Coralie an injury. Berenice drew aside a curtain, and he fled into a
dainty dressing-room, whither Coralie and the maid brought his clothes
with magical speed.

Camusot appeared, and only then did
Coralie's eyes alight on Lucien's boots, warming in the fender.
Berenice had privately varnished them, and put them before the fire to
dry; and both mistress and maid alike forgot that tell-tale witness.
Berenice left the room with a scared glance at Coralie. Coralie flung
herself into the depths of a settee, and bade Camusot seat himself in
the _gondole_, a round-backed chair that stood opposite. But Coralie's
adorer, honest soul, dared not look his mistress in the face; he could
not take his eyes off the pair of boots.

"Ought I to make a
scene and leave Coralie?" he pondered. "Is it worth while to make a
fuss about a trifle? There is a pair of boots wherever you go. These
would be more in place in a shop window or taking a walk on the
boulevard on somebody's feet; here, however, without a pair of feet in
them, they tell a pretty plain tale. I am fifty years old, and that is
the truth; I ought to be as blind as Cupid himself."

There was
no excuse for this mean-spirited monologue. The boots were not the
high-lows at present in vogue, which an unobservant man may be allowed
to disregard up to a certain point. They were the unmistakable,
uncompromising hessians then prescribed by fashion, a pair of extremely
elegant betasseled boots, which shone in glistening contrast against
tight-fitting trousers invariably of some light color, and reflected
their surroundings like a mirror. The boots stared the honest
silk-mercer out of countenance, and, it must be added, they pained his
heart.

"What is it?" asked Coralie.

"Nothing."

"Ring
the bell," said Coralie, smiling to herself at Camusot's want of
spirit.--"Berenice," she said, when the Norman handmaid appeared, "just
bring me a button-hook, for I must put on these confounded boots again.
Don't forget to bring them to my dressing-room to-night."

"And
whose should they be?" she demanded haughtily. "Were you beginning to
believe?--great stupid! Oh! and he would believe it too," she went on,
addressing Berenice.--"I have a man's part in What's-his-name's piece,
and I have never worn a man's clothes in my life before. The bootmaker
for the theatre brought me these things to try if I could walk in them,
until a pair can be made to measure. He put them on, but they hurt me
so much that I have taken them off, and after all I must wear them."

"Don't put them on again if they are uncomfortable," said Camusot. (The
boots had made him feel so very uncomfortable himself.)

"Mademoiselle
would do better to have a pair made of very thin morocco, sir, instead
of torturing herself as she did just now; but the management is so
stingy. She was crying, sir; if I was a man and loved a woman, I
wouldn't let her shed a tear, I know. You ought to order a pair for
her----"

"Yes, yes," said Camusot. "Are you just getting up, Coralie?"

"Just
this moment; I only came in at six o'clock after looking for you
everywhere. I was obliged to keep the cab for seven hours. So much for
your care of me; you forget me for a wine-bottle. I ought to take care
of myself now when I am to play every night so long as the _Alcalde_
draws. I don't want to fall off after that young man's notice of me."

"That is a handsome boy," said Camusot.

"Do
you think so? I don't admire men of that sort; they are too much like
women; and they do not understand how to love like you stupid old
business men. You are so bored with your own society."

"Is monsieur dining with madame?" inquired Berenice.

"No, my mouth is clammy."

"You were nicely screwed yesterday. Ah! Papa Camusot, I don't like men
who drink, I tell you at once----"

"You will give that young man a present, I suppose?" interrupted
Camusot.

"Oh!
yes. I would rather do that than pay as Florine does. There, go away
with you, good-for-nothing that one loves; or give me a carriage to
save time in future."

"You shall go in your own carriage
to-morrow to your manager's dinner at the _Rocher de Cancale_. The new
piece will not be given next Sunday."

"Come, I am just going to dine," said Coralie, hurrying Camusot out of
the room.

An
hour later Berenice came to release Lucien. Berenice, Coralie's
companion since her childhood, had a keen and subtle brain in her
unwieldy frame.

"Stay here," she said. "Coralie is coming back
alone; she even talked of getting rid of Camusot if he is in your way;
but you are too much of an angel to ruin her, her heart's darling as
you are. She wants to clear out of this, she says; to leave this
paradise and go and live in your garret. Oh! there are those that are
jealous and envious of you, and they have told her that you haven't a
brass farthing, and live in the Latin Quarter; and I should go, too,
you see, to do the house-work.--But I have just been comforting her,
poor child! I have been telling her that you were too clever to do
anything so silly. I was right, wasn't I, sir? Oh! you will see that
you are her darling, her love, the god to whom she gives her soul;
yonder old fool has nothing but the body.--If you only knew how nice
she is when I hear her say her part over! My Coralie, my little pet,
she is! She deserved that God in heaven should send her one of His
angels. She was sick of the life.--She was so unhappy with her mother
that used to beat her, and sold her. Yes, sir, sold her own child! If I
had a daughter, I would wait on her hand and foot as I wait on Coralie;
she is like my own child to me.--These are the first good times she has
seen since I have been with her; the first time that she has been
really applauded. You have written something, it seems, and they have
got up a famous _claque_ for the second performance. Braulard has been
going through the play with her while you were asleep."

"Who? Braulard?" asked Lucien; it seemed to him that he had heard the
name before.

"He
is the head of the _claqueurs_, and she was arranging with him the
places where she wished him to look after her. Florine might try to
play her some shabby trick, and take all for herself, for all she calls
herself her friend. There is such a talk about your article on the
Boulevards.--Isn't it a bed fit for a prince," she said, smoothing the
lace bed-spread.

She lighted the wax-candles, and to Lucien's
bewildered fancy, the house seemed to be some palace in the _Cabinet
des Fees_. Camusot had chosen the richest stuffs from the _Golden
Cocoon_ for the hangings and window-curtains. A carpet fit for a king's
palace was spread upon the floor. The carving of the rosewood furniture
caught and imprisoned the light that rippled over its surface.
Priceless trifles gleamed from the white marble chimney-piece. The rug
beside the bed was of swan's skins bordered with sable. A pair of
little, black velvet slippers lined with purple silk told of happiness
awaiting the poet of _The Marguerites_. A dainty lamp hung from the
ceiling draped with silk. The room was full of flowering plants,
delicate white heaths and scentless camellias, in stands marvelously
wrought. Everything called up associations of innocence. How was it
possible in these rooms to see the life that Coralie led in its true
colors? Berenice noticed Lucien's bewildered expression.

"Isn't
it nice?" she said coaxingly. "You would be more comfortable here,
wouldn't you, than in a garret?--You won't let her do anything rash?"
she continued, setting a costly stand before him, covered with dishes
abstracted from her mistress' dinner-table, lest the cook should
suspect that her mistress had a lover in the house.

Lucien made
a good dinner. Berenice waiting on him, the dishes were of wrought
silver, the painted porcelain plates had cost a louis d'or apiece. The
luxury was producing exactly the same effect upon him that the sight of
a girl walking the pavement, with her bare flaunting throat and neat
ankles, produces upon a schoolboy.

"How lucky Camusot is!" cried he.

"Lucky?"
repeated Berenice. "He would willingly give all that he is worth to be
in your place; he would be glad to barter his gray hair for your golden
head."

She gave Lucien the richest wine that Bordeaux keeps for
the wealthiest English purchaser, and persuaded Lucien to go to bed to
take a preliminary nap; and Lucien, in truth, was quite willing to
sleep on the couch that he had been admiring. Berenice had read his
wish, and felt glad for her mistress.

At half-past ten that
night Lucien awoke to look into eyes brimming over with love. There
stood Coralie in most luxurious night attire. Lucien had been sleeping;
Lucien was intoxicated with love, and not with wine. Berenice left the
room with the inquiry, "What time to-morrow morning?"

"At eleven o'clock. We will have breakfast in bed. I am not at home to
anybody before two o'clock."

At
two o'clock in the afternoon Coralie and her lover were sitting
together. The poet to all appearance had come to pay a call. Lucien had
been bathed and combed and dressed. Coralie had sent to Colliau's for a
dozen fine shirts, a dozen cravats and a dozen pocket-handkerchiefs for
him, as well as twelve pairs of gloves in a cedar-wood box. When a
carriage stopped at the door, they both rushed to the window, and
watched Camusot alight from a handsome coupe.

"I would not have believed that one could so hate a man and luxury----"

"I am too poor to allow you to ruin yourself for me," he replied. And
thus Lucien passed under the Caudine Forks.

"Poor
pet," said Coralie, holding him tightly to her, "do you love me so
much?--I persuaded this gentleman to call on me this morning," she
continued, indicating Lucien to Camusot, who entered the room. "I
thought that we might take a drive in the Champs Elysees to try the
carriage."

"Go without me," said Camusot in a melancholy voice;
"I shall not dine with you. It is my wife's birthday, I had forgotten
that."

"Poor Musot, how badly bored you will be!" she said, putting her arms
about his neck.

She
was wild with joy at the thought that she and Lucien would handsel this
gift together; she would drive with him in the new carriage; and in her
happiness, she seemed to love Camusot, she lavished caresses upon him.

"If only I could give you a carriage every day!" said the poor fellow.

"Now,
sir, it is two o'clock," she said, turning to Lucien, who stood in
distress and confusion, but she comforted him with an adorable gesture.

Down
the stairs she went, several steps at a time, drawing Lucien after her;
the elderly merchant following in their wake like a seal on land, and
quite unable to catch them up.

Lucien enjoyed the most
intoxicating of pleasures; happiness had increased Coralie's loveliness
to the highest possible degree; she appeared before all eyes an
exquisite vision in her dainty toilette. All Paris in the Champs
Elysees beheld the lovers.

In an avenue of the Bois de Boulogne
they met a caleche; Mme. d'Espard and Mme. de Bargeton looked in
surprise at Lucien, and met a scornful glance from the poet. He saw
glimpses of a great future before him, and was about to make his power
felt. He could fling them back in a glance some of the revengeful
thoughts which had gnawed his heart ever since they planted them there.
That moment was one of the sweetest in his life, and perhaps decided
his fate. Once again the Furies seized on Lucien at the bidding of
Pride. He would reappear in the world of Paris; he would take a signal
revenge; all the social pettiness hitherto trodden under foot by the
worker, the member of the brotherhood, sprang up again afresh in his
soul.

Now he understood all that Lousteau's attack had meant.
Lousteau had served his passions; while the brotherhood, that
collective mentor, had seemed to mortify them in the interests of
tiresome virtues and work which began to look useless and hopeless in
Lucien's eyes. Work! What is it but death to an eager pleasure-loving
nature? And how easy it is for the man of letters to slide into a _far
niente_ existence of self-indulgence, into the luxurious ways of
actresses and women of easy virtues! Lucien felt an overmastering
desire to continue the reckless life of the last two days.

The
dinner at the _Rocher de Cancale_ was exquisite. All Florine's supper
guests were there except the Minister, the Duke, and the dancer;
Camusot, too, was absent; but these gaps were filled by two famous
actors and Hector Merlin and his mistress. This charming woman, who
chose to be known as Mme. du Val-Noble, was the handsomest and most
fashionable of the class of women now euphemistically styled _lorettes_.

Lucien
had spent the forty-eight hours since the success of his article in
paradise. He was feted and envied; he gained self-possession; his talk
sparkled; he was the brilliant Lucien de Rubempre who shone for a few
months in the world of letters and art. Finot, with his infallible
instinct for discovering ability, scenting it afar as an ogre might
scent human flesh, cajoled Lucien, and did his best to secure a recruit
for the squadron under his command. And Coralie watched the manoeuvres
of this purveyor of brains, saw that Lucien was nibbling at the bait,
and tried to put him on his guard.

"Don't make any engagement, dear boy; wait. They want to exploit you;
we will talk of it to-night."

"Pshaw!" said Lucien. "I am sure I am quite as sharp and shrewd as they
can be."

Finot
and Hector Merlin evidently had not fallen out over that affair of the
white lines and spaces in the columns, for it was Finot who introduced
Lucien to the journalist. Coralie and Mme. du Val-Noble were
overwhelmingly amiable and polite to each other, and Mme. du Val-Noble
asked Lucien and Coralie to dine with her.

Hector Merlin, short
and thin, with lips always tightly compressed, was the most dangerous
journalist present. Unbounded ambition and jealousy smouldered within
him; he took pleasure in the pain of others, and fomented strife to
turn it to his own account. His abilities were but slender, and he had
little force of character, but the natural instinct which draws the
upstart towards money and power served him as well as fixity of
purpose. Lucien and Merlin at once took a dislike to one another, for
reasons not far to seek. Merlin, unfortunately, proclaimed aloud the
thoughts that Lucien kept to himself. By the time the dessert was put
on the table, the most touching friendship appeared to prevail among
the men, each one of whom in his heart thought himself a cleverer
fellow than the rest; and Lucien as the newcomer was made much of by
them all. They chatted frankly and unrestrainedly. Hector Merlin,
alone, did not join in the laughter. Lucien asked the reason of his
reserve.

"You are just entering the world of letters, I can
see," he said. "You are a journalist with all your illusions left. You
believe in friendship. Here we are friends or foes, as it happens; we
strike down a friend with the weapon which by rights should only be
turned against an enemy. You will find out, before very long, that fine
sentiments will do nothing for you. If you are naturally kindly, learn
to be ill-natured, to be consistently spiteful. If you have never heard
this golden rule before, I give it you now in confidence, and it is no
small secret. If you have a mind to be loved, never leave your mistress
until you have made her shed a tear or two; and if you mean to make
your way in literature, let other people continually feel your teeth;
make no exception even of your friends; wound their susceptibilities,
and everybody will fawn upon you."

Hector Merlin watched Lucien
as he spoke, saw that his words went to the neophyte's heart like a
stab, and Hector Merlin was glad. Play followed, Lucien lost all his
money, and Coralie brought him away; and he forgot for a while, in the
delights of love, the fierce excitement of the gambler, which was to
gain so strong a hold upon him.

When he left Coralie in the
morning and returned to the Latin Quarter, he took out his purse and
found the money he had lost. At first he felt miserable over the
discovery, and thought of going back at once to return a gift which
humiliated him; but--he had already come as far as the Rue de la Harpe;
he would not return now that he had almost reached the Hotel de Cluny.
He pondered over Coralie's forethought as he went, till he saw in it a
proof of the maternal love which is blended with passion in women of
her stamp. For Coralie and her like, passion includes every human
affection. Lucien went from thought to thought, and argued himself into
accepting the gift. "I love her," he said; "we shall live together as
husband and wife; I will never forsake her!"

What mortal, short
of a Diogenes, could fail to understand Lucien's feelings as he climbed
the dirty, fetid staircase to his lodging, turned the key that grated
in the lock, and entered and looked round at the unswept brick floor,
at the cheerless grate, at the ugly poverty and bareness of the room.

A package of manuscript was lying on the table. It was his novel; a
note from Daniel d'Arthez lay beside it:--

"Our friends are almost satisfied with your work, dear poet," d'Arthez
wrote. "You will be able to present it with more confidence now, they
say, to friends and enemies. We saw your charming article on the
Panorama-Dramatique; you are sure to excite as much jealousy in the
profession as regret among your friends here. DANIEL."

"Regrets! What does he mean?" exclaimed Lucien. The polite tone of the
note astonished him. Was he to be henceforth a stranger to the
brotherhood? He had learned to set a higher value on the good opinion
and the friendship of the circle in the Rue des Quatre-Vents since he
had tasted of the delicious fruits offered to him by the Eve of the
theatrical underworld. For some moments he stood in deep thought; he
saw his present in the garret, and foresaw his future in Coralie's
rooms. Honorable resolution struggled with temptation and swayed him
now this way, now that. He sat down and began to look through his
manuscript, to see in what condition his friends had returned it to
him. What was his amazement, as he read chapter after chapter, to find
his poverty transmuted into riches by the cunning of the pen, and the
devotion of the unknown great men, his friends of the brotherhood.
Dialogue, closely packed, nervous, pregnant, terse, and full of the
spirit of the age, replaced his conversations, which seemed poor and
pointless prattle in comparison. His characters, a little uncertain in
the drawing, now stood out in vigorous contrast of color and relief;
physiological observations, due no doubt to Horace Bianchon, supplied
links of interpretations between human character and the curious
phenomena of human life--subtle touches which made his men and women
live. His wordy passages of description were condensed and vivid. The
misshapen, ill-clad child of his brain had returned to him as a lovely
maiden, with white robes and rosy-hued girdle and scarf--an entrancing
creation. Night fell and took him by surprise, reading through rising
tears, stricken to earth by such greatness of soul, feeling the worth
of such a lesson, admiring the alterations, which taught him more of
literature and art than all his four years' apprenticeship of study and
reading and comparison. A master's correction of a line made upon the
study always teaches more than all the theories and criticisms in the
world.

"What friends are these! What hearts! How fortunate I am!" he cried,
grasping his manuscript tightly.

With
the quick impulsiveness of a poetic and mobile temperament, he rushed
off to Daniel's lodging. As he climbed the stairs, and thought of these
friends, who refused to leave the path of honor, he felt conscious that
he was less worthy of them than before. A voice spoke within him,
telling him that if d'Arthez had loved Coralie, he would have had her
break with Camusot. And, besides this, he knew that the brotherhood
held journalism in utter abhorrence, and that he himself was already,
to some small extent, a journalist. All of them, except Meyraux, who
had just gone out, were in d'Arthez's room when he entered it, and saw
that all their faces were full of sorrow and despair.

"What is it?" he cried.

"We
have just heard news of a dreadful catastrophe; the greatest thinker of
the age, our most loved friend, who was like a light among us for two
years----"

"Louis Lambert!"

"Has fallen a victim to catalepsy. There is no hope for him," said
Bianchon.

"He will die, his soul wandering in the skies, his body unconscious on
earth," said Michel Chrestien solemnly.

"He will die as he lived," said d'Arthez.

"Love fell like a firebrand in the vast empire of his brain and burned
him away," said Leon Giraud.

"Yes," said Joseph Bridau, "he has reached a height that we cannot so
much as see."

"_We_ are to be pitied, not Louis," said Fulgence Ridal.

"Perhaps he will recover," exclaimed Lucien.

"From
what Meyraux has been telling us, recovery seems impossible," answered
Bianchon. "Medicine has no power over the change that is working in his
brain."

"I came here with a heart full of gratitude to you all," said Lucien.
"You have changed my alloy into golden coin."

"Gratitude! For what do you take us?" asked Bianchon.

"We had the pleasure," added Fulgence.

"Well,
so you are a journalist, are you?" asked Leon Giraud. "The fame of your
first appearance has reached even the Latin Quarter."

"I am not a journalist yet," returned Lucien.

"Aha! So much the better," said Michel Chrestien.

"I
told you so!" said d'Arthez. "Lucien knows the value of a clean
conscience. When you can say to yourself as you lay your head on the
pillow at night, 'I have not sat in judgment on another man's work; I
have given pain to no one; I have not used the edge of my wit to deal a
stab to some harmless soul; I have sacrificed no one's success to a
jest; I have not even troubled the happiness of imbecility; I have not
added to the burdens of genius; I have scorned the easy triumphs of
epigram; in short, I have not acted against my convictions,' is not
this a viaticum that gives one daily strength?"

"But one can say
all this, surely, and yet work on a newspaper," said Lucien. "If I had
absolutely no other way of earning a living, I should certainly come to
this."

"He
will turn journalist," Leon Giraud said gravely. "Oh, Lucien, if you
would only stay and work with us! We are about to bring out a
periodical in which justice and truth shall never be violated; we will
spread doctrines that, perhaps, will be of real service to mankind----"

"You will not have a single subscriber," Lucien broke in with
Machiavellian wisdom.

"There will be five hundred of them," asserted Michel Chrestien, "but
they will be worth five hundred thousand."

"You will need a lot of capital," continued Lucien.

"No, only devotion," said d'Arthez.

"Anybody
might take him for a perfumer's assistant," burst out Michel Chrestien,
looking at Lucien's head, and sniffing comically. "You were seen
driving about in a very smart turnout with a pair of thoroughbreds, and
a mistress for a prince, Coralie herself."

"Well, and is there any harm in it?"

"You would not say that if you thought that there was no harm in it,"
said Bianchon.

"I could have wished Lucien a Beatrice," said d'Arthez, "a noble woman,
who would have been a help to him in life----"

"Ah!"
said the republican member, "on that one point I am an aristocrat. I
could not bring myself to love a woman who must rub shoulders with all
sorts of people in the green-room; whom an actor kisses on stage; she
must lower herself before the public, smile on every one, lift her
skirts as she dances, and dress like a man, that all the world may see
what none should see save I alone. Or if I loved such a woman, she
should leave the stage, and my love should cleanse her from the stain
of it."

"And if she would not leave the stage?"

"I should die of mortification, jealousy, and all sorts of pain. You
cannot pluck love out of your heart as you draw a tooth."

Lucien's face grew dark and thoughtful.

"When they find out that I am tolerating Camusot, how they will despise
me," he thought.

"Look
here," said the fierce republican, with humorous fierceness, "you can
be a great writer, but a little play-actor you shall never be," and he
took up his hat and went out.

"He is hard, is Michel Chrestien," commented Lucien.

"Hard
and salutary, like the dentist's pincers," said Bianchon. "Michel
foresees your future; perhaps in the street, at this moment, he is
thinking of you with tears in his eyes."

D'Arthez was kind, and
talked comfortingly, and tried to cheer Lucien. The poet spent an hour
with his friends, then he went, but his conscience treated him hardly,
crying to him, "You will be a journalist--a journalist!" as the witch
cried to Macbeth that he should be king hereafter!

Out in the
street, he looked up at d'Arthez's windows, and saw a faint light
shining in them, and his heart sank. A dim foreboding told him that he
had bidden his friends good-bye for the last time.

As he turned
out of the Place de la Sorbonne into the Rue de Cluny, he saw a
carriage at the door of his lodging. Coralie had driven all the way
from the Boulevard du Temple for the sake of a moment with her lover
and a "good-night." Lucien found her sobbing in his garret. She would
be as wretchedly poor as her poet, she wept, as she arranged his shirts
and gloves and handkerchiefs in the crazy chest of drawers. Her
distress was so real and so great, that Lucien, but even now chidden
for his connection with an actress, saw Coralie as a saint ready to
assume the hair-shirt of poverty. The adorable girl's excuse for her
visit was an announcement that the firm of Camusot, Coralie, and Lucien
meant to invite Matifat, Florine, and Lousteau (the second trio) to
supper; had Lucien any invitations to issue to people who might be
useful to him? Lucien said that he would take counsel of Lousteau.

A
few moments were spent together, and Coralie hurried away. She spared
Lucien the knowledge that Camusot was waiting for her below.

Next
morning, at eight o'clock, Lucien went to Etienne Lousteau's room,
found it empty, and hurried away to Florine. Lousteau and Florine,
settled into possession of their new quarters like a married couple,
received their friend in the pretty bedroom, and all three breakfasted
sumptuously together.

"Why, I should advise you, my boy, to come
with me to see Felicien Vernou," said Lousteau, when they sat at table,
and Lucien had mentioned Coralie's projected supper; "ask him to be of
the party, and keep well with him, if you can keep well with such a
rascal. Felicien Vernou does a _feuilleton_ for a political paper; he
might perhaps introduce you, and you could blossom out into leaders in
it at your ease. It is a Liberal paper, like ours; you will be a
Liberal, that is the popular party; and besides, if you mean to go over
to the Ministerialists, you would do better for yourself if they had
reason to be afraid of you. Then there is Hector Merlin and his Mme. du
Val-Noble; you meet great people at their house--dukes and dandies and
millionaires; didn't they ask you and Coralie to dine with them?"

"Yes,"
replied Lucien; "you are going too, and so is Florine." Lucien and
Etienne were now on familiar terms after Friday's debauch and the
dinner at the _Rocher de Cancale_.

"Very well, Merlin is on the
paper; we shall come across him pretty often; he is the chap to follow
close on Finot's heels. You would do well to pay him attention; ask him
and Mme. du Val-Noble to supper. He may be useful to you before long;
for rancorous people are always in need of others, and he may do you a
good turn if he can reckon on your pen."

"Your beginning has
made enough sensation to smooth your way," said Florine; "take
advantage of it at once, or you will soon be forgotten."

"The
bargain, the great business, is concluded," Lousteau continued. "That
Finot, without a spark of talent in him, is to be editor of Dauriat's
weekly paper, with a salary of six hundred francs per month, and owner
of a sixth share, for which he has not paid one penny. And I, my dear
fellow, am now editor of our little paper. Everything went off as I
expected; Florine managed superbly, she could give points to Tallyrand
himself."

"We have a hold on men through their pleasures," said
Florine, "while a diplomatist only works on their self-love. A
diplomatist sees a man made up for the occasion; we know him in his
moments of folly, so our power is greater."

"And when the thing
was settled, Matifat made the first and last joke of his whole
druggist's career," put in Lousteau. "He said, 'This affair is quite in
my line; I am supplying drugs to the public.'"

"I suspect that Florine put him up to it," cried Lucien.

"And by these means, my little dear, your foot is in the stirrup,"
continued Lousteau.

"You
were born with a silver spoon in your mouth," remarked Florine. "What
lots of young fellows wait for years, wait till they are sick of
waiting, for a chance to get an article into a paper! You will do like
Emile Blondet. In six months' time you will be giving yourself high and
mighty airs," she added, with a mocking smile, in the language of her
class.

"Haven't I been in Paris for three years?" said Lousteau,
"and only yesterday Finot began to pay me a fixed monthly salary of
three hundred francs, and a hundred francs per sheet for his paper."

"Well; you are saying nothing!" exclaimed Florine, with her eyes turned
on Lucien.

"We shall see," said Lucien.

"My
dear boy, if you had been my brother, I could not have done more for
you," retorted Lousteau, somewhat nettled, "but I won't answer for
Finot. Scores of sharp fellows will besiege Finot for the next two days
with offers to work for low pay. I have promised for you, but you can
draw back if you like.--You little know how lucky you are," he added
after a pause. "All those in our set combine to attack an enemy in
various papers, and lend each other a helping hand all round."

"Let
us go in the first place to Felicien Vernou," said Lucien. He was eager
to conclude an alliance with such formidable birds of prey.

Lousteau
sent for a cab, and the pair of friends drove to Vernou's house on the
second floor up an alley in the Rue Mandar. To Lucien's great
astonishment, the harsh, fastidious, and severe critic's surroundings
were vulgar to the last degree. A marbled paper, cheap and shabby, with
a meaningless pattern repeated at regular intervals, covered the walls,
and a series of aqua tints in gilt frames decorated the apartment,
where Vernou sat at table with a woman so plain that she could only be
the legitimate mistress of the house, and two very small children
perched on high chairs with a bar in front to prevent the infants from
tumbling out. Felicien Vernou, in a cotton dressing-gown contrived out
of the remains of one of his wife's dresses, was not over well pleased
by this invasion.

"Have you breakfasted, Lousteau?" he asked, placing a chair for Lucien.

"We have just left Florine; we have been breakfasting with her."

Lucien
could not take his eyes off Mme. Vernou. She looked like a stout,
homely cook, with a tolerably fair complexion, but commonplace to the
last degree. The lady wore a bandana tied over her night-cap, the
strings of the latter article of dress being tied so tightly under the
chin that her puffy cheeks stood out on either side. A shapeless,
beltless garment, fastened by a single button at the throat, enveloped
her from head to foot in such a fashion that a comparison to a
milestone at once suggested itself. Her health left no room for hope;
her cheeks were almost purple; her fingers looked like sausages. In a
moment it dawned upon Lucien how it was that Vernou was always so ill
at ease in society; here was the living explanation of his misanthropy.
Sick of his marriage, unable to bring himself to abandon his wife and
family, he had yet sufficient of the artistic temper to suffer
continually from their presence; Vernou was an actor by nature bound
never to pardon the success of another, condemned to chronic discontent
because he was never content with himself. Lucien began to understand
the sour look which seemed to add to the bleak expression of envy on
Vernou's face; the acerbity of the epigrams with which his conversation
was sown, the journalist's pungent phrases, keen and elaborately
wrought as a stiletto, were at once explained.

"Let us go into my study," Vernou said, rising from the table; "you
have come on business, no doubt."

"Yes and no," replied Etienne Lousteau. "It is a supper, old chap."

"I
have brought a message from Coralie," said Lucien (Mme. Vernou looked
up at once at the name), "to ask you to supper to-night at her house to
meet the same company as before at Florine's, and a few more
besides--Hector Merlin and Mme. du Val-Noble and some others. There
will be play afterwards."

"But we are engaged to Mme. Mahoudeau this evening, dear," put in the
wife.

"What does that matter?" returned Vernou.

"She will take offence if we don't go; and you are very glad of her
when you have a bill to discount."

"This
wife of mine, my dear boy, can never be made to understand that a
supper engagement for twelve o'clock does not prevent you from going to
an evening party that comes to an end at eleven. She is always with me
while I work," he added.

"You have so much imagination!" said Lucien, and thereby made a mortal
enemy of Vernou.

"Well,"
continued Lousteau, "you are coming; but that is not all. M. de
Rubempre is about to be one of us, so you must push him in your paper.
Give him out for a chap that will make a name for himself in
literature, so that he can put in at least a couple of articles every
month."

"Yes, if he means to be one of us, and will attack our
enemies, as we will attack his, I will say a word for him at the Opera
to-night," replied Vernou.

"We will get up a success," said Lousteau, and he rose with a bow to
his colleague's wife.

The
abrupt departure was necessary indeed; for the two infants, engaged in
a noisy quarrel, were fighting with their spoons, and flinging the pap
in each other's faces.

"That, my boy, is a woman who all
unconsciously will work great havoc in contemporary literature," said
Etienne, when they came away. "Poor Vernou cannot forgive us for his
wife. He ought to be relieved of her in the interests of the public;
and a deluge of blood-thirsty reviews and stinging sarcasms against
successful men of every sort would be averted. What is to become of a
man with such a wife and that pair of abominable brats? Have you seen
Rigaudin in Picard's _La Maison en Loterie_? You have? Well, like
Rigaudin, Vernou will not fight himself, but he will set others
fighting; he would give an eye to put out both eyes in the head of the
best friend he has. You will see him using the bodies of the slain for
a stepping-stone, rejoicing over every one's misfortunes, attacking
princes, dukes, marquises, and nobles, because he himself is a
commoner; reviling the work of unmarried men because he forsooth has a
wife; and everlastingly preaching morality, the joys of domestic life,
and the duties of the citizen. In short, this very moral critic will
spare no one, not even infants of tender age. He lives in the Rue
Mandar with a wife who might be the _Mamamouchi_ of the _Bourgeois
gentilhomme_ and a couple of little Vernous as ugly as sin. He tries to
sneer at the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where he will never set foot, and
makes his duchesses talk like his wife. That is the sort of man to
raise a howl at the Jesuits, insult the Court, and credit the Court
party with the design of restoring feudal rights and the right of
primogeniture--just the one to preach a crusade for Equality, he that
thinks himself the equal of no one. If he were a bachelor, he would go
into society; if he were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a
pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist,
and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred. Journalism is the
giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds. Have you any wish to
marry after this? Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him,
it is all turned to gall; and he is emphatically the Journalist, a
tiger with two hands that tears everything to pieces, as if his pen had
the hydrophobia."

"It is a case of gunophobia," said Lucien. "Has he ability?"

"He
is witty, he is a writer of articles. He incubates articles; he does
that all his life and nothing else. The most dogged industry would fail
to graft a book on his prose. Felicien is incapable of conceiving a
work on a large scale, of broad effects, of fitting characters
harmoniously in a plot which develops till it reaches a climax. He has
ideas, but he has no knowledge of facts; his heroes are utopian
creatures, philosophical or Liberal notions masquerading. He is at
pains to write an original style, but his inflated periods would
collapse at a pin-prick from a critic; and therefore he goes in terror
of reviews, like every one else who can only keep his head above water
with the bladders of newspaper puffs."

"What an article you are making out of him!"

"That particular kind, my boy, must be spoken, and never written."

"You are turning editor," said Lucien.

"Where shall I put you down?"

"At Coralie's."

"Ah!
we are infatuated," said Lousteau. "What a mistake! Do as I do with
Florine, let Coralie be your housekeeper, and take your fling."

"You would send a saint to perdition," laughed Lucien.

"Well, there is no damning a devil," retorted Lousteau.

The
flippant tone, the brilliant talk of this new friend, his views of
life, his paradoxes, the axioms of Parisian Machiavelism,--all these
things impressed Lucien unawares. Theoretically the poet knew that such
thoughts were perilous; but he believed them practically useful.

Arrived
in the Boulevard du Temple, the friends agreed to meet at the office
between four and five o'clock. Hector Merlin would doubtless be there.
Lousteau was right. The infatuation of desire was upon Lucien; for the
courtesan who loves knows how to grapple her lover to her by every
weakness in his nature, fashioning herself with incredible flexibility
to his every wish, encouraging the soft, effeminate habits which
strengthen her hold. Lucien was thirsting already for enjoyment; he was
in love with the easy, luxurious, and expensive life which the actress
led.

He found Coralie and Camusot intoxicated with joy. The
Gymnase offered Coralie an engagement after Easter on terms for which
she had never dared to hope.

"And this great success is owing to you," said Camusot.

"Yes,
surely. _The Alcalde_ would have fallen flat but for him," cried
Coralie; "if there had been no article, I should have been in for
another six years of the Boulevard theatres."

She danced up to
Lucien and flung her arms round him, putting an indescribable silken
softness and sweetness into her enthusiasm. Love had come to Coralie.
And Camusot? his eyes fell. Looking down after the wont of mankind in
moments of sharp pain, he saw the seam of Lucien's boots, a deep yellow
thread used by the best bootmakers of that time, in strong contrast
with the glistening leather. The color of that seam had tinged his
thoughts during a previous conversation with himself, as he sought to
explain the presence of a mysterious pair of hessians in Coralie's
fender. He remembered now that he had seen the name of "Gay, Rue de la
Michodiere," printed in black letters on the soft white kid lining.

"You have a handsome pair of boots, sir," he said.

"Like everything else about him," said Coralie.

"I should be very glad of your bootmaker's address."

"Oh,
how like the Rue des Bourdonnais to ask for a tradesman's address,"
cried Coralie. "Do _you_ intend to patronize a young man's bootmaker? A
nice young man you would make! Do keep to your own top-boots; they are
the kind for a steady-going man with a wife and family and a mistress."

"Indeed, if you would take off one of your boots, sir, I should be very
much obliged," persisted Camusot.

"I could not get it on again without a button-hook," said Lucien,
flushing up.

"Berenice will fetch you one; we can do with some here," jeered Camusot.

"Papa
Camusot!" said Coralie, looking at him with cruel scorn, "have the
courage of your pitiful baseness. Come, speak out! You think that this
gentleman's boots are very like mine, do you not?--I forbid you to take
off your boots," she added, turning to Lucien.--"Yes, M. Camusot. Yes,
you saw some boots lying about in the fender here the other day, and
that is the identical pair, and this gentleman was hiding in my
dressing-room at the time, waiting for them; and he had passed the
night here. That was what you were thinking, _hein_? Think so; I would
rather you did. It is the simple truth. I am deceiving you. And if I
am? I do it to please myself."

She sat down. There was no anger
in her face, no embarrassment; she looked from Camusot to Lucien. The
two men avoided each other's eyes.

"I will believe nothing that you do not wish me to believe," said
Camusot. "Don't play with me, Coralie; I was wrong----"

"I
am either a shameless baggage that has taken a sudden fancy; or a poor,
unhappy girl who feels what love really is for the first time, the love
that all women long for. And whichever way it is, you must leave me or
take me as I am," she said, with a queenly gesture that crushed Camusot.

"Is it really true?" he asked, seeing from their faces that this was no
jest, yet begging to be deceived.

"I love mademoiselle," Lucien faltered out.

At
that word, Coralie sprang to her poet and held him tightly to her;
then, with her arms still about him, she turned to the silk-mercer, as
if to bid him see the beautiful picture made by two young lovers.

"Poor
Musot, take all that you gave to me back again; I do not want to keep
anything of yours; for I love this boy here madly, not for his
intellect, but for his beauty. I would rather starve with him than have
millions with you."

Camusot sank into a low chair, hid his face in his hands, and said not
a word.

"Would you like us to go away?" she asked. There was a note of ferocity
in her voice which no words can describe.

Cold chills ran down Lucien's spine; he beheld himself burdened with a
woman, an actress, and a household.

"Stay
here, Coralie; keep it all," the old tradesman said at last, in a
faint, unsteady voice that came from his heart; "I don't want anything
back. There is the worth of sixty thousand francs here in the
furniture; but I could not bear to think of my Coralie in want. And
yet, it will not be long before you come to want. However great this
gentleman's talent may be, he can't afford to keep you. We old fellows
must expect this sort of thing. Coralie, let me come and see you
sometimes; I may be of use to you. And--I confess it; I cannot live
without you."

The poor man's gentleness, stripped as he was of
his happiness just as happiness had reached its height, touched Lucien
deeply. Coralie was quite unsoftened by it.

"Come as often as you wish, poor Musot," she said; "I shall like you
all the better when I don't pretend to love you."

Camusot
seemed to be resigned to his fate so long as he was not driven out of
the earthly paradise, in which his life could not have been all joy; he
trusted to the chances of life in Paris and to the temptations that
would beset Lucien's path; he would wait a while, and all that had been
his should be his again. Sooner or later, thought the wily tradesman,
this handsome young fellow would be unfaithful; he would keep a watch
on him; and the better to do this and use his opportunity with Coralie,
he would be their friend. The persistent passion that could consent to
such humiliation terrified Lucien. Camusot's proposal of a dinner at
Very's in the Palais Royal was accepted.

"What joy!" cried
Coralie, as soon as Camusot had departed. "You will not go back now to
your garret in the Latin Quarter; you will live here. We shall always
be together. You can take a room in the Rue Charlot for the sake of
appearances, and _vogue le galere_!"

She began to dance her Spanish dance, with an excited eagerness that
revealed the strength of the passion in her heart.

"If I work hard I may make five hundred francs a month," Lucien said.

"And
I shall make as much again at the theatre, without counting extras.
Camusot will pay for my dresses as before. He is fond of me! We can
live like Croesus on fifteen hundred francs a month."

"And the horses? and the coachman? and the footman?" inquired Berenice.

"I will get into debt," said Coralie. And she began to dance with
Lucien.

"I must close with Finot after this," Lucien exclaimed.

"There!"
said Coralie, "I will dress and take you to your office. I will wait
outside in the boulevard for you with the carriage."

Lucien sat
down on the sofa and made some very sober reflections as he watched
Coralie at her toilet. It would have been wiser to leave Coralie free
than to start all at once with such an establishment; but Coralie was
there before his eyes, and Coralie was so lovely, so graceful, so
bewitching, that the more picturesque aspects of bohemia were in
evidence; and he flung down the gauntlet to fortune.

Berenice
was ordered to superintend Lucien's removal and installation; and
Coralie, triumphant, radiant, and happy, carried off her love, her
poet, and must needs go all over Paris on the way to the Rue
Saint-Fiacre. Lucien sprang lightly up the staircase, and entered the
office with an air of being quite at home. Coloquinte was there with
the stamped paper still on his head; and old Giroudeau told him again,
hypocritically enough, that no one had yet come in.

"But the editor and contributors _must_ meet somewhere or other to
arrange about the journal," said Lucien.

"Very
likely; but I have nothing to do with the writing of the paper," said
the Emperor's captain, resuming his occupation of checking off wrappers
with his eternal broum! broum!

Was it lucky or unlucky? Finot
chanced to come in at that very moment to announce his sham abdication
and to bid Giroudeau watch over his interests.

"No shilly-shally
with this gentleman; he is on the staff," Finot added for his uncle's
benefit, as he grasped Lucien by the hand.

"Oh! is he on the
paper?" exclaimed Giroudeau, much surprised at this friendliness.
"Well, sir, you came on without much difficulty."

"I want to
make things snug for you here, lest Etienne should bamboozle you,"
continued Finot, looking knowingly at Lucien. "This gentleman will be
paid three francs per column all round, including theatres."

"You have never taken any one on such terms before," said Giroudeau,
opening his eyes.

"And
he will take the four Boulevard theatres. See that nobody sneaks his
boxes, and that he gets his share of tickets.--I should advise you,
nevertheless, to have them sent to your address," he added, turning to
Lucien.--"And he agrees to write besides ten miscellaneous articles of
two columns each, for fifty francs per month, for one year. Does that
suit you?"

"Yes," said Lucien. Circumstances had forced his hand.

"Draw up the agreement, uncle, and we will sign it when we come
downstairs."

"Who is the gentleman?" inquired Giroudeau, rising and taking off his
black silk skull-cap.

"M. Lucien de Rubempre, who wrote the article on _The Alcalde_."

"Young
man, you have a gold mine _there_," said the old soldier, tapping
Lucien on the forehead. "I am not literary myself, but I read that
article of yours, and I liked it. That is the kind of thing! There's
gaiety for you! 'That will bring us new subscribers,' says I to myself.
And so it did. We sold fifty more numbers."

"Is my agreement with Lousteau made out in duplicate and ready to
sign?" asked Finot, speaking aside.

"Yes."

"Then ante-date this gentleman's agreement by one day, so that Lousteau
will be bound by the previous contract."

Finot took his new contributor's arm with a friendliness that charmed
Lucien, and drew him out on the landing to say:--

"Your
position is made for you. I will introduce you to _my_ staff myself,
and to-night Lousteau will go round with you to the theatres. You can
make a hundred and fifty francs per month on this little paper of ours
with Lousteau as its editor, so try to keep well with him. The rogue
bears a grudge against me as it is, for tying his hands so far as you
are concerned; but you have ability, and I don't choose that you shall
be subjected to the whims of the editor. You might let me have a couple
of sheets every month for my review, and I will pay you two hundred
francs. This is between ourselves, don't mention it to anybody else; I
should be laid open to the spite of every one whose vanity is mortified
by your good fortune. Write four articles, fill your two sheets, sign
two with your own name, and two with a pseudonym, so that you may not
seem to be taking the bread out of anybody else's mouth. You owe your
position to Blondet and Vignon; they think that you have a future
before you. So keep out of scrapes, and, above all things, be on your
guard against your friends. As for me, we shall always get on well
together, you and I. Help me, and I will help you. You have forty
francs' worth of boxes and tickets to sell, and sixty francs' worth of
books to convert into cash. With that and your work on the paper, you
will be making four hundred and fifty francs every month. If you use
your wits, you will find ways of making another two hundred francs at
least among the publishers; they will pay you for reviews and
prospectuses. But you are mine, are you not? I can count upon you."

Lucien squeezed Finot's hand in transports of joy which no words can
express.

"Don't
let any one see that anything has passed between us," said Finot in his
ear, and he flung open a door of a room in the roof at the end of a
long passage on the fifth floor.

A table covered with a green
cloth was drawn up to a blazing fire, and seated in various chairs and
lounges Lucien discovered Lousteau, Felicien Vernou, Hector Merlin, and
two others unknown to him, all laughing or smoking. A real inkstand,
full of ink this time, stood on the table among a great litter of
papers; while a collection of pens, the worse for wear, but still
serviceable for journalists, told the new contributor very plainly that
the mighty enterprise was carried on in this apartment.

"Gentlemen,"
said Finot, "the object of this gathering is the installation of our
friend Lousteau in my place as editor of the newspaper which I am
compelled to relinquish. But although my opinions will necessarily
undergo a transformation when I accept the editorship of a review of
which the politics are known to you, my _convictions_ remain the same,
and we shall be friends as before. I am quite at your service, and you
likewise will be ready to do anything for me. Circumstances change;
principles are fixed. Principles are the pivot on which the hands of
the political barometer turn."

There was an instant shout of laughter.

"Who put that into your mouth?" asked Lousteau.

"Blondet!" said Finot.

"Windy, showery, stormy, settled fair," said Merlin; "we will all row
in the same boat."

"In
short," continued Finot, "not to muddle our wits with metaphors, any
one who has an article or two for me will always find Finot.--This
gentleman," turning to Lucien, "will be one of you.--I have arranged
with him, Lousteau."

Every one congratulated Finot on his advance and new prospects.

"So
there you are, mounted on our shoulders," said a contributor whom
Lucien did not know. "You will be the Janus of Journal----"

"So long as he isn't the Janot," put in Vernou.

"Are you going to allow us to make attacks on our _betes noires_?"

"Any one you like."

"Ah,
yes!" said Lousteau; "but the paper must keep on its lines. M. Chatelet
is very wroth; we shall not let him off for a week yet."

"What has happened?" asked Lucien.

"He
came here to ask for an explanation," said Vernou. "The Imperial buck
found old Giroudeau at home; and old Giroudeau told him, with all the
coolness in the world, that Philippe Bridau wrote the article. Philippe
asked the Baron to mention the time and the weapons, and there it
ended. We are engaged at this moment in offering excuses to the Baron
in to-morrow's issue. Every phrase is a stab for him."

"Keep
your teeth in him and he will come round to me," said Finot; "and it
will look as if I were obliging him by appeasing you. He can say a word
to the Ministry, and we can get something or other out of him--an
assistant schoolmaster's place, or a tobacconist's license. It is a
lucky thing for us that we flicked him on the raw. Does anybody here
care to take a serious article on Nathan for my new paper?"

"Give it to Lucien," said Lousteau. "Hector and Vernou will write
articles in their papers at the same time."

"Good-day, gentlemen; we shall meet each other face to face at
Barbin's," said Finot, laughing.

Lucien
received some congratulations on his admission to the mighty army of
journalists, and Lousteau explained that they could be sure of him.
"Lucien wants you all to sup in a body at the house of the fair
Coralie."

"Coralie is going on at the Gymnase," said Lucien.

"Very
well, gentlemen; it is understood that we push Coralie, eh? Put a few
lines about her new engagement in your papers, and say something about
her talent. Credit the management of the Gymnase with tack and
discernment; will it do to say intelligence?"

"Yes, say intelligence," said Merlin; "Frederic has something of
Scribe's."

"Oh! Well, then, the manager of the Gymnase is the most perspicacious
and far-sighted of men of business," said Vernou.

"Look
here! don't write your articles on Nathan until we have come to an
understanding; you shall hear why," said Etienne Lousteau. "We ought to
do something for our new comrade. Lucien here has two books to bring
out--a volume of sonnets and a novel. The power of the paragraph should
make him a great poet due in three months; and we will make use of his
sonnets (_Marguerites_ is the title) to run down odes, ballads, and
reveries, and all the Romantic poetry."

"It would be a droll
thing if the sonnets were no good after all," said Vernou.--"What do
you yourself think of your sonnets, Lucien?"

"Yes, what do you think of them?" asked one of the two whom Lucien did
not know.

"They are all right, gentlemen; I give you my word," said Lousteau.

"Very well, that will do for me," said Vernou; "I will heave your book
at the poets of the sacristy; I am tired of them."

"If Dauriat declines to take the _Marguerites_ this evening, we will
attack him by pitching into Nathan."

"But what will Nathan say?" cried Lucien.

His five colleagues burst out laughing.

"Oh! he will be delighted," said Vernou. "You will see how we manage
these things."

"So he is one of us?" said one of the two journalists.

"Yes,
yes, Frederic; no tricks.--We are all working for you, Lucien, you see;
you must stand by us when your turn comes. We are all friends of
Nathan's, and we are attacking him. Now, let us divide Alexander's
empire.--Frederic, will you take the Francais and the Odeon?"

"If
these gentlemen are willing," returned the person addressed as
Frederic. The others nodded assent, but Lucien saw a gleam of jealousy
here and there.

"I am keeping the Opera, the Italiens, and the Opera-Comique," put in
Vernou.

"And how about me? Am I to have no theatres at all?" asked the second
stranger.

"Oh
well, Hector can let you have the Varietes, and Lucien can spare you
the Porte Saint-Martin.--Let him have the Porte Saint-Martin, Lucien,
he is wild about Fanny Beaupre; and you can take the Cirque-Olympique
in exchange. I shall have Bobino and the Funambules and Madame Saqui.
Now, what have we for to-morrow?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing."

"Gentlemen,
be brilliant for my first number. The Baron du Chatelet and his
cuttlefish bone will not last for a week, and the writer of _Le
Solitaire_ is worn out."

"And 'Sosthenes-Demosthenes' is stale too," said Vernou; "everybody has
taken it up."

"The fact is, we want a new set of ninepins," said Frederic.

"Suppose
that we take the virtuous representatives of the Right?" suggested
Lousteau. "We might say that M. de Bonald has sweaty feet."

"Let us begin a series of sketches of Ministerialist orators,"
suggested Hector Merlin.

"You
do that, youngster; you know them; they are your own party," said
Lousteau; "you could indulge any little private grudges of your own.
Pitch into Beugnot and Syrieys de Mayrinhac and the rest. You might
have the sketches ready in advance, and we shall have something to fall
back upon."

"How if we invented one or two cases of refusal of burial with
aggravating circumstances?" asked Hector.

"Do
not follow in the tracks of the big Constitutional papers; they have
pigeon-holes full of ecclesiastical _canards_," retorted Vernou.

"_Canards_?" repeated Lucien.

"That
is our word for a scrap of fiction told for true, put in to enliven the
column of morning news when it is flat. We owe the discovery to
Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the lightning conductor and the
republic. That journalist completely deceived the Encyclopaedists by
his transatlantic _canards_. Raynal gives two of them for facts in his
_Histoire philosophique des Indes_."

"I did not know that," said Vernou. "What were the stories?"

"One
was a tale about an Englishman and a negress who helped him to escape;
he sold the woman for a slave after getting her with child himself to
enhance her value. The other was the eloquent defence of a young woman
brought before the authorities for bearing a child out of wedlock.
Franklin owned to the fraud in Necker's house when he came to Paris,
much to the confusion of French philosophism. Behold how the New World
twice set a bad example to the Old!"

"In journalism," said Lousteau, "everything that is probable is true.
That is an axiom."

"Criminal procedure is based on the same rule," said Vernou.

"Very
well, we meet here at nine o'clock," and with that they rose, and the
sitting broke up with the most affecting demonstrations of intimacy and
good-will.

"What have you done to Finot, Lucien, that he should
make a special arrangement with you? You are the only one that he has
bound to himself," said Etienne Lousteau, as they came downstairs.

"I? Nothing. It was his own proposal," said Lucien.

"As
a matter of fact, if you should make your own terms with him, I should
be delighted; we should, both of us, be the better for it."

On
the ground floor they found Finot. He stepped across to Lousteau and
asked him into the so-called private office. Giroudeau immediately put
a couple of stamped agreements before Lucien.

"Sign your agreement," he said, "and the new editor will think the
whole thing was arranged yesterday."

Lucien,
reading the document, overheard fragments of a tolerably warm dispute
within as to the line of conduct and profits of the paper. Etienne
Lousteau wanted his share of the blackmail levied by Giroudeau; and, in
all probability, the matter was compromised, for the pair came out
perfectly good friends.

"We will meet at Dauriat's, Lucien, in the Wooden Galleries at eight
o'clock," said Etienne Lousteau.

A
young man appeared, meanwhile, in search of employment, wearing the
same nervous shy look with which Lucien himself had come to the office
so short a while ago; and in his secret soul Lucien felt amused as he
watched Giroudeau playing off the same tactics with which the old
campaigner had previously foiled him. Self-interest opened his eyes to
the necessity of the manoeuvres which raised well-nigh insurmountable
barriers between beginners and the upper room where the elect were
gathered together.

"Contributors don't get very much as it is," he said, addressing
Giroudeau.

"If there were more of you, there would be so much less," retorted the
captain. "So there!"

The
old campaigner swung his loaded cane, and went down coughing as usual.
Out in the street he was amazed to see a handsome carriage waiting on
the boulevard for Lucien.

"_You_ are the army nowadays," he said, "and we are the civilians."

"Upon
my word," said Lucien, as he drove away with Coralie, "these young
writers seem to me to be the best fellows alive. Here am I a
journalist, sure of making six hundred francs a month if I work like a
horse. But I shall find a publisher for my two books, and I will write
others; for my friends will insure a success. And so, Coralie, '_vogue
le galere_!' as you say."

"You will make your way, dear boy; but
you must not be as good-natured as you are good-looking; it would be
the ruin of you. Be ill-natured, that is the proper thing."

Coralie
and Lucien drove in the Bois de Boulogne, and again they met the
Marquise d'Espard, Mme. de Bargeton and the Baron du Chatelet. Mme. de
Bargeton gave Lucien a languishing glance which might be taken as a
greeting. Camusot had ordered the best possible dinner; and Coralie,
feeling that she was rid of her adorer, was more charming to the poor
silk-mercer than she had ever been in the fourteen months during which
their connection lasted; he had never seen her so kindly, so
enchantingly lovely.

"Come," he thought, "let us keep near her anyhow!"

In
consequence, Camusot made secret overtures. He promised Coralie an
income of six thousand livres; he would transfer the stock in the funds
into her name (his wife knew nothing about the investment) if only she
would consent to be his mistress still. He would shut his eyes to her
lover.

"And betray such an angel? . . . Why, just look at him,
you old fossil, and look at yourself!" and her eyes turned to her poet.
Camusot had pressed Lucien to drink till the poet's head was rather
cloudy.

There was no help for it; Camusot made up his mind to wait till sheer
want should give him this woman a second time.

"Then I can only be your friend," he said, as he kissed her on the
forehead.

Lucien
went from Coralie and Camusot to the Wooden Galleries. What a change
had been wrought in his mind by his initiation into Journalism! He
mixed fearlessly now with the crowd which surged to and fro in the
buildings; he even swaggered a little because he had a mistress; and he
walked into Dauriat's shop in an offhand manner because he was a
journalist.

He found himself among distinguished men; gave a
hand to Blondet and Nathan and Finot, and to all the coterie with whom
he had been fraternizing for a week. He was a personage, he thought,
and he flattered himself that he surpassed his comrades. That little
flick of the wine did him admirable service; he was witty, he showed
that he could "howl with the wolves."

And yet, the tacit
approval, the praises spoken and unspoken on which he had counted, were
not forthcoming. He noticed the first stirrings of jealousy among a
group, less curious, perhaps, than anxious to know the place which this
newcomer might take, and the exact portion of the sum-total of profits
which he would probably secure and swallow. Lucien only saw smiles on
two faces--Finot, who regarded him as a mine to be exploited, and
Lousteau, who considered that he had proprietary rights in the poet,
looked glad to see him. Lousteau had begun already to assume the airs
of an editor; he tapped sharply on the window-panes of Dauriat's
private office.

"One moment, my friend," cried a voice within as the publisher's face
appeared above the green curtains.

The moment lasted an hour, and finally Lucien and Etienne were admitted
into the sanctum.

"Well, have you thought over our friend's proposal?" asked Etienne
Lousteau, now an editor.

"To
be sure," said Dauriat, lolling like a sultan in his chair. "I have
read the volume. And I submitted it to a man of taste, a good judge;
for I don't pretend to understand these things myself. I myself, my
friend, buy reputations ready-made, as the Englishman bought his love
affairs.--You are as great as a poet as you are handsome as a man, my
boy," pronounced Dauriat. "Upon my word and honor (I don't tell you
that as a publisher, mind), your sonnets are magnificent; no sign of
effort about them, as is natural when a man writes with inspiration and
verve. You know your craft, in fact, one of the good points of the new
school. Your volume of _Marguerites_ is a fine book, but there is no
business in it, and it is not worth my while to meddle with anything
but a very big affair. In conscience, I won't take your sonnets. It
would be impossible to push them; there is not enough in the thing to
pay the expenses of a big success. You will not keep to poetry besides;
this book of yours will be your first and last attempt of the kind. You
are young; you bring me the everlasting volume of early verse which
every man of letters writes when he leaves school, he thinks a lot of
it at the time, and laughs at it later on. Lousteau, your friend, has a
poem put away somewhere among his old socks, I'll warrant. Haven't you
a poem that you thought a good deal of once, Lousteau?" inquired
Dauriat, with a knowing glance at the other.

"How should I be writing prose otherwise, eh?" asked Lousteau.

"There,
you see! He has never said a word to me about it, for our friend
understands business and the trade," continued Dauriat. "For me the
question is not whether you are a great poet, I know that," he added,
stroking down Lucien's pride; "you have a great deal, a very great deal
of merit; if I were only just starting in business, I should make the
mistake of publishing your book. But in the first place, my sleeping
partners and those at the back of me are cutting off my supplies; I
dropped twenty thousand francs over poetry last year, and that is
enough for them; they will not hear of any more just now, and they are
my masters. Nevertheless, that is not the question. I admit that you
may be a great poet, but will you be a prolific writer? Will you hatch
sonnets regularly? Will you run into ten volumes? Is there business in
it? Of course not. You will be a delightful prose writer; you have too
much sense to spoil your style with tagging rhymes together. You have a
chance to make thirty thousand francs per annum by writing for the
papers, and you will not exchange that chance for three thousand francs
made with difficulty by your hemistiches and strophes and
tomfoolery----"

"You know that he is on the paper, Dauriat?" put in Lousteau.

"Yes,"
Dauriat answered. "Yes, I saw his article, and in his own interests I
decline the _Marguerites_. Yes, sir, in six months' time I shall have
paid you more money for the articles that I shall ask you to write than
for your poetry that will not sell."

"And fame?" said Lucien.

Dauriat and Lousteau laughed.

"Oh dear!" said Lousteau, "there be illusions left."

"Fame
means ten years of sticking to work, and a hundred thousand francs lost
or made in the publishing trade. If you find anybody mad enough to
print your poetry for you, you will feel some respect for me in another
twelvemonth, when you have had time to see the outcome of the
transaction"

Lucien
took up the roll without looking at the string, so sure he felt that
Dauriat had read his _Marguerites_. He went out with Lousteau,
seemingly neither disconcerted nor dissatisfied. Dauriat went with them
into the shop, talking of his newspaper and Lousteau's daily, while
Lucien played with the manuscript of the _Marguerites_.

"Do you
suppose that Dauriat has read your sonnets or sent them to any one
else?" Etienne Lousteau snatched an opportunity to whisper.

"Yes," said Lucien.

"Look
at the string." Lucien looked down at the blot of ink, and saw that the
mark on the string still coincided; he turned white with rage.

"Which of the sonnets was it that you particularly liked?" he asked,
turning to the publisher.

"They
are all of them remarkable, my friend; but the sonnet on the
_Marguerite_ is delightful, the closing thought is fine, and
exquisitely expressed. I felt sure from that sonnet that your prose
work would command a success, and I spoke to Finot about you at once.
Write articles for us, and we will pay you well for them. Fame is a
very fine thing, you see, but don't forget the practical and solid, and
take every chance that turns up. When you have made money, you can
write poetry."

The poet dashed out of the shop to avoid an explosion. He was furious.
Lousteau followed.

"Well, my boy, pray keep cool. Take men as they are--for means to an
end. Do you wish for revenge?"

"At any price," muttered the poet.

"Here
is a copy of Nathan's book. Dauriat has just given it to me. The second
edition is coming out to-morrow; read the book again, and knock off an
article demolishing it. Felicien Vernou cannot endure Nathan, for he
thinks that Nathan's success will injure his own forthcoming book. It
is a craze with these little minds to fancy that there is not room for
two successes under the sun; so he will see that your article finds a
place in the big paper for which he writes."

"But what is there to be said against the book; it is good work!" cried
Lucien.

"Oh,
I say! you must learn your trade," said Lousteau, laughing. "Given that
the book was a masterpiece, under the stroke of your pen it must turn
to dull trash, dangerous and unwholesome stuff."

"But how?"

"You turn all the good points into bad ones."

"I am incapable of such a juggler's feat."

"My
dear boy, a journalist is a juggler; a man must make up his mind to the
drawbacks of the calling. Look here! I am not a bad fellow; this is the
way _I_ should set to work myself. Attention! You might begin by
praising the book, and amuse yourself a while by saying what you really
think. 'Good,' says the reader, 'this critic is not jealous; he will be
impartial, no doubt,' and from that point your public will think that
your criticism is a piece of conscientious work. Then, when you have
won your reader's confidence, you will regret that you must blame the
tendency and influence of such work upon French literature. 'Does not
France,' you will say, 'sway the whole intellectual world? French
writers have kept Europe in the path of analysis and philosophical
criticism from age to age by their powerful style and the original turn
given by them to ideas.' Here, for the benefit of the philistine,
insert a panegyric on Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, and
Buffon. Hold forth upon the inexorable French language; show how it
spreads a varnish, as it were, over thought. Let fall a few aphorisms,
such as--'A great writer in France is invariably a great man; he writes
in a language which compels him to think; it is otherwise in other
countries'--and so on, and so on. Then, to prove your case, draw a
comparison between Rabener, the German satirical moralist, and La
Bruyere. Nothing gives a critic such an air as an apparent familiarity
with foreign literature. Kant is Cousin's pedestal.

"Once on
that ground you bring out a word which sums up the French men of genius
of the eighteenth century for the benefit of simpletons--you call that
literature the 'literature of ideas.' Armed with this expression, you
fling all the mighty dead at the heads of the illustrious living. You
explain that in the present day a new form of literature has sprung up;
that dialogue (the easiest form of writing) is overdone, and
description dispenses with any need for thinking on the part of the
author or reader. You bring up the fiction of Voltaire, Diderot,
Sterne, and Le Sage, so trenchant, so compact of the stuff of life; and
turn from them to the modern novel, composed of scenery and
word-pictures and metaphor and the dramatic situations, of which Scott
is full. Invention may be displayed in such work, but there is no room
for anything else. 'The romance after the manner of Scott is a mere
passing fashion in literature,' you will say, and fulminate against the
fatal way in which ideas are diluted and beaten thin; cry out against a
style within the reach of any intellect, for any one can commence
author at small expense in a way of literature, which you can nickname
the 'literature of imagery.'

"Then you fall upon Nathan with
your argument, and establish it beyound cavil that he is a mere
imitator with an appearance of genius. The concise grand style of the
eighteenth century is lacking; you show that the author substitutes
events for sentiments. Action and stir is not life; he gives you
pictures, but no ideas.

"Come out with such phrases, and people
will take them up.--In spite of the merits of the work, it seems to you
to be a dangerous, nay, a fatal precedent. It throws open the gates of
the temple of Fame to the crowd; and in the distance you descry a
legion of petty authors hastening to imitate this novel and easy style
of writing.

"Here you launch out into resounding lamentations
over the decadence and decline of taste, and slip in eulogies of
Messieurs Etienne Jouy, Tissot, Gosse, Duval, Jay, Benjamin Constant,
Aignan, Baour-Lormian, Villemain, and the whole Liberal-Bonapartist
chorus who patronize Vernou's paper. Next you draw a picture of that
glorious phalanx of writers repelling the invasion of the Romantics;
these are the upholders of ideas and style as against metaphor and
balderdash; the modern representatives of the school of Voltaire as
opposed to the English and German schools, even as the seventeen heroic
deputies of the Left fought the battle for the nation against the
Ultras of the Right.

"And then, under cover of names respected
by the immense majority of Frenchmen (who will always be against the
Government), you can crush Nathan; for although his work is far above
the average, it confirms the bourgeois taste for literature without
ideas. And after that, you understand, it is no longer a question of
Nathan and his book, but of France and the glory of France. It is the
duty of all honest and courageous pens to make strenuous opposition to
these foreign importations. And with that you flatter your readers.
Shrewd French mother-wit is not easily caught napping. If publishers,
by ways which you do not choose to specify, have stolen a success, the
reading public very soon judges for itself, and corrects the mistakes
made by some five hundred fools, who always rush to the fore.

"Say
that the publisher who sold a first edition of the book is audacious
indeed to issue a second, and express regret that so clever a man does
not know the taste of the country better. There is the gist of it. Just
a sprinkle of the salt of wit and a dash of vinegar to bring out the
flavor, and Dauriat will be done to a turn. But mind that you end with
seeming to pity Nathan for a mistake, and speak of him as of a man from
whom contemporary literature may look for great things if he renounces
these ways."

Lucien was amazed at this talk from Lousteau. As
the journalist spoke, the scales fell from his eyes; he beheld new
truths of which he had never before caught so much as a glimpse.

"But all this that you are saying is quite true and just," said he.

"If
it were not, how could you make it tell against Nathan's book?" asked
Lousteau. "That is the first manner of demolishing a book, my boy; it
is the pickaxe style of criticism. But there are plenty of other ways.
Your education will complete itself in time. When you are absolutely
obliged to speak of a man whom you do not like, for proprietors and
editors are sometimes under compulsion, you bring out a neutral special
article. You put the title of the book at the head of it, and begin
with general remarks, on the Greeks and the Romans if you like, and
wind up with--'and this brings us to Mr. So-and-so's book, which will
form the subject of a second article.' The second article never
appears, and in this way you snuff out the book between two promises.
But in this case you are writing down, not Nathan, but Dauriat; he
needs the pickaxe style. If the book is really good, the pickaxe does
no harm; but it goes to the core of it if it is bad. In the first case,
no one but the publisher is any the worse; in the second, you do the
public a service. Both methods, moreover, are equally serviceable in
political criticism."

Etienne Lousteau's cruel lesson opened up possibilities for Lucien's
imagination. He understood this craft to admiration.

"Let
us go to the office," said Lousteau; "we shall find our friends there,
and we will agree among ourselves to charge at Nathan; they will laugh,
you will see."

Arrived in the Rue Saint-Fiacre, they went up to
the room in the roof where the paper was made up, and Lucien was
surprised and gratified no less to see the alacrity with which his
comrades proceeded to demolish Nathan's book. Hector Merlin took up a
piece of paper and wrote a few lines for his own newspaper.--

"A second edition of M. Nathan's book is announced. We had intended to
keep silence with regard to that work, but its apparent success obliges
us to publish an article, not so much upon the book itself as upon
certain tendencies of the new school of literature."

At the head of the "Facetiae" in the morning's paper, Lousteau inserted
the following note:--

"M. Dauriat is bringing out a second edition of M. Nathan's book.
Evidently he does not know the legal maxim, _Non bis in idem_. All
honor to rash courage."

Lousteau's words had been like a torch
for burning; Lucien's hot desire to be revenged on Dauriat took the
place of conscience and inspiration. For three days he never left
Coralie's room; he sat at work by the fire, waited upon by Berenice;
petted, in moments of weariness, by the silent and attentive Coralie;
till, at the end of that time, he had made a fair copy of about three
columns of criticism, and an astonishingly good piece of work.

It
was nine o'clock in the evening when he ran round to the office, found
his associates, and read over his work to an attentive audience.
Felicien said not a syllable. He took up the manuscript, and made off
with it pell-mell down the staircase.

"What has come to him?" cried Lucien.

"He
has taken your article straight to the printer," said Hector Merlin.
"'Tis a masterpiece; not a line to add, nor a word to take out."

"There was no need to do more than show you the way," said Lousteau.

"I should like to see Nathan's face when he reads this to-morrow," said
another contributor, beaming with gentle satisfaction.

"It is as well to have you for a friend," remarked Hector Merlin.

"Then it will do?" Lucien asked quickly.

"Blondet and Vignon will feel bad," said Lousteau.

"Here is a short article which I have knocked together for you," began
Lucien; "if it takes, I could write you a series."

"Read
it over," said Lousteau, and Lucien read the first of the delightful
short papers which made the fortune of the little newspaper; a series
of sketches of Paris life, a portrait, a type, an ordinary event, or
some of the oddities of the great city. This specimen--"The Man in the
Street"--was written in a way that was fresh and original; the thoughts
were struck out by the shock of the words, the sounding ring of the
adverbs and adjectives caught the reader's ear. The paper was as
different from the serious and profound article on Nathan as the
_Lettres persanes_ from the _Esprit des lois_.

"You are a born journalist," said Lousteau. "It shall go in to-morrow.
Do as much of this sort of thing as you like."

"Ah,
by the by," said Merlin, "Dauriat is furious about those two bombshells
hurled into his magazine. I have just come from him. He was hurling
imprecations, and in such a rage with Finot, who told him that he had
sold his paper to you. As for me, I took him aside and just said a word
in his ear. 'The _Marguerites_ will cost you dear,' I told him. 'A man
of talent comes to you, you turn the cold shoulder on him, and send him
into the arms of the newspapers.'"

"Dauriat will be dumfounded
by the article on Nathan," said Lousteau. "Do you see now what
journalism is, Lucien? Your revenge is beginning to tell. The Baron
Chatelet came here this morning for your address. There was a cutting
article upon him in this morning's issue; he is a weakling, that buck
of the Empire, and he has lost his head. Have you seen the paper? It is
a funny article. Look, 'Funeral of the Heron, and the Cuttlefish-bone's
lament.' Mme. de Bargeton is called the Cuttlefish-bone now, and no
mistake, and Chatelet is known everywhere as Baron Heron."

Lucien took up the paper, and could not help laughing at Vernou's
extremely clever skit.

"They will capitulate soon," said Hector Merlin.

Lucien
merrily assisted at the manufacture of epigrams and jokes at the end of
the paper; and the associates smoked and chatted over the day's
adventures, over the foibles of some among their number, or some new
bit of personal gossip. From their witty, malicious, bantering talk,
Lucien gained a knowledge of the inner life of literature, and of the
manners and customs of the craft.

"While they are setting up the
paper, I will go round with you and introduce you to the managers of
your theatres, and take you behind the scenes," said Lousteau. "And
then we will go to the Panorama-Dramatique, and have a frolic in their
dressing-rooms."

Arm-in-arm, they went from theatre to theatre.
Lucien was introduced to this one and that, and enthroned as a dramatic
critic. Managers complimented him, actresses flung him side glances;
for every one of them knew that this was the critic who, by a single
article, had gained an engagement at the Gymnase, with twelve thousand
francs a year, for Coralie, and another for Florine at the
Panorama-Dramatique with eight thousand francs. Lucien was a man of
importance. The little ovations raised Lucien in his own eyes, and
taught him to know his power. At eleven o'clock the pair arrived at the
Panorama-Dramatique; Lucien with a careless air that worked wonders.
Nathan was there. Nathan held out a hand, which Lucien squeezed.

"Ah! my masters, so you have a mind to floor me, have you?" said
Nathan, looking from one to the other.

"Just
you wait till to-morrow, my dear fellow, and you shall see how Lucien
has taken you in hand. Upon my word, you will be pleased. A piece of
serious criticism like that is sure to do a book good."

Lucien reddened with confusion.

"Is it severe?" inquired Nathan.

"It is serious," said Lousteau.

"Then
there is no harm done," Nathan rejoined. "Hector Merlin in the
greenroom of the Vaudeville was saying that I had been cut up."

"Let
him talk, and wait," cried Lucien, and took refuge in Coralie's
dressing-room. Coralie, in her alluring costume, had just come off the
stage.

Next morning, as Lucien and Coralie sat at
breakfast, a carriage drove along the Rue de Vendome. The street was
quiet enough, so that they could hear the light sound made by an
elegant cabriolet; and there was that in the pace of the horse, and the
manner of pulling up at the door, which tells unmistakably of a
thoroughbred. Lucien went to the window, and there, in fact, beheld a
splendid English horse, and no less a person than Dauriat flinging the
reins to his man as he stepped down.

"'Tis the publisher, Coralie," said Lucien.

"Let him wait, Berenice," Coralie said at once.

Lucien
smiled at her presence of mind, and kissed her with a great rush of
tenderness. This mere girl had made his interests hers in a wonderful
way; she was quick-witted where he was concerned. The apparition of the
insolent publisher, the sudden and complete collapse of that prince of
charlatans, was due to circumstances almost entirely forgotten, so
utterly has the book trade changed during the last fifteen years.

From
1816 to 1827, when newspaper reading-rooms were only just beginning to
lend new books, the fiscal law pressed more heavily than ever upon
periodical publications, and necessity created the invention of
advertisements. Paragraphs and articles in the newspapers were the only
means of advertisement known in those days; and French newspapers
before the year 1822 were so small, that the largest sheet of those
times was not so large as the smallest daily paper of ours. Dauriat and
Ladvocat, the first publishers to make a stand against the tyranny of
journalists, were also the first to use the placards which caught the
attention of Paris by strange type, striking colors, vignettes, and (at
a later time) by lithograph illustrations, till a placard became a
fairy-tale for the eyes, and not unfrequently a snare for the purse of
the amateur. So much originality indeed was expended on placards in
Paris, that one of that peculiar kind of maniacs, known as a collector,
possesses a complete series.

At first the placard was confined
to the shop-windows and stalls upon the Boulevards in Paris; afterwards
it spread all over France, till it was supplanted to some extent by a
return to advertisements in the newspapers. But the placard,
nevertheless, which continues to strike the eye, after the
advertisement and the book which is advertised are both forgotten, will
always be among us; it took a new lease of life when walls were
plastered with posters.

Newspaper advertising, the offspring of
heavy stamp duties, a high rate of postage, and the heavy deposits of
caution-money required by the government as security for good behavior,
is within the reach of all who care to pay for it, and has turned the
fourth page of every journal into a harvest field alike for the
speculator and the Inland Revenue Department. The press restrictions
were invented in the time of M. de Villele, who had a chance, if he had
but known it, of destroying the power of journalism by allowing
newspapers to multiply till no one took any notice of them; but he
missed his opportunity, and a sort of privilege was created, as it
were, by the almost insuperable difficulties put in the way of starting
a new venture. So, in 1821, the periodical press might be said to have
power of life and death over the creations of the brain and the
publishing trade. A few lines among the items of news cost a fearful
amount. Intrigues were multiplied in newspaper offices; and of a night
when the columns were divided up, and this or that article was put in
or left out to suit the space, the printing-room became a sort of
battlefield; so much so, that the largest publishing firms had writers
in their pay to insert short articles in which many ideas are put in
little space. Obscure journalists of this stamp were only paid after
the insertion of the items, and not unfrequently spent the night in the
printing-office to make sure that their contributions were not omitted;
sometimes putting in a long article, obtained heaven knows how,
sometimes a few lines of a puff.

The manners and customs of
journalism and of the publishing houses have since changed so much,
that many people nowadays will not believe what immense efforts were
made by writers and publishers of books to secure a newspaper puff; the
martyrs of glory, and all those who are condemned to the penal
servitude of a life-long success, were reduced to such shifts, and
stooped to depths of bribery and corruption as seem fabulous to-day.
Every kind of persuasion was brought to bear on journalists--dinners,
flattery, and presents. The following story will throw more light on
the close connection between the critic and the publisher than any
quantity of flat assertions.

There was once upon a time an
editor of an important paper, a clever writer with a prospect of
becoming a statesman; he was young in those days, and fond of pleasure,
and he became the favorite of a well-known publishing house. One Sunday
the wealthy head of the firm was entertaining several of the foremost
journalists of the time in the country, and the mistress of the house,
then a young and pretty woman, went to walk in her park with the
illustrious visitor. The head-clerk of the firm, a cool, steady,
methodical German with nothing but business in his head, was discussing
a project with one of the journalists, and as they chatted they walked
on into the woods beyond the park. In among the thickets the German
thought he caught a glimpse of his hostess, put up his eyeglass, made a
sign to his young companion to be silent, and turned back, stepping
softly.--"What did you see?" asked the journalist.--"Nothing
particular," said the clerk. "Our affair of the long article is
settled. To-morrow we shall have at least three columns in the
_Debats_."

Another anecdote will show the influence of a single article.

A
book of M. de Chateaubriand's on the last of the Stuarts was for some
time a "nightingale" on the bookseller's shelves. A single article in
the _Journal des Debats_ sold the work in a week. In those days, when
there were no lending libraries, a publisher would sell an edition of
ten thousand copies of a book by a Liberal if it was well reviewed by
the Opposition papers; but then the Belgian pirated editions were not
as yet.

The preparatory attacks made by Lucien's friends,
followed up by his article on Nathan, proved efficacious; they stopped
the sale of his book. Nathan escaped with the mortification; he had
been paid; he had nothing to lose; but Dauriat was like to lose thirty
thousand francs. The trade in new books may, in fact, be summed up much
on this wise. A ream of blank paper costs fifteen francs, a ream of
printed paper is worth anything between a hundred sous and a hundred
crowns, according to its success; a favorable or unfavorable review at
a critical time often decides the question; and Dauriat having five
hundred reams of printed paper on hand, hurried to make terms with
Lucien. The sultan was now the slave.

After waiting for some
time, fidgeting and making as much noise as he could while parleying
with Berenice, he at last obtained speech of Lucien; and, arrogant
publisher though he was, he came in with the radiant air of a courtier
in the royal presence, mingled, however, with a certain
self-sufficiency and easy good humor.

"Don't disturb yourselves,
my little dears! How nice they look, just like a pair of turtle-doves!
Who would think now, mademoiselle, that he, with that girl's face of
his, could be a tiger with claws of steel, ready to tear a reputation
to rags, just as he tears your wrappers, I'll be bound, when you are
not quick enough to unfasten them," and he laughed before he had
finished his jest.

"My dear boy----" he began, sitting down
beside Lucien. --"Mademoiselle, I am Dauriat," he said, interrupting
himself. He judged it expedient to fire his name at her like a pistol
shot, for he considered that Coralie was less cordial than she should
have been.

"Have you breakfasted, monsieur; will you keep us company?" asked
Coralie.

"Why,
yes; it is easier to talk at table," said Dauriat. "Besides, by
accepting your invitation I shall have a right to expect you to dine
with my friend Lucien here, for we must be close friends now, hand and
glove!"

"You are too clever not to know what has brought me here," said
Dauriat, fixing his eyes on Lucien.

"You have come to buy my sonnets."

"Precisely.
First of all, let us lay down our arms on both sides." As he spoke he
took out a neat pocketbook, drew from it three bills for a thousand
francs each, and laid them before Lucien with a suppliant air. "Is
monsieur content?" asked he.

"Yes," said the poet. A sense of
beatitude, for which no words exist, flooded his soul at the sight of
that unhoped wealth. He controlled himself, but he longed to sing
aloud, to jump for joy; he was ready to believe in Aladdin's lamp and
in enchantment; he believed in his own genius, in short.

"Then the _Marguerites_ are mine," continued Dauriat; "but you will
undertake not to attack my publications, won't you?"

"The _Marguerites_ are yours, but I cannot pledge my pen; it is at the
service of my friends, as theirs are mine."

"But
you are one of my authors now. All my authors are my friends. So you
won't spoil my business without warning me beforehand, so that I am
prepared, will you?"

"I agree to that."

"To your fame!" and Dauriat raised his glass.

"I see that you have read the _Marguerites_," said Lucien.

Dauriat was not disconcerted.

"My
boy, a publisher cannot pay a greater compliment than by buying your
_Marguerites_ unread. In six months' time you will be a great poet. You
will be written up; people are afraid of you; I shall have no
difficulty in selling your book. I am the same man of business that I
was four days ago. It is not I who have changed; it is _you_. Last week
your sonnets were so many cabbage leaves for me; to-day your position
has ranked them beside Delavigne."

"Ah well," said Lucien, "if
you have not read my sonnets, you have read my article." With the
sultan's pleasure of possessing a fair mistress, and the certainty of
success, he had grown satirical and adorably impertinent of late.

"Yes,
my friend; do you think I should have come here in such a hurry but for
that? That terrible article of yours is very well written, worse luck.
Oh! you have a very great gift, my boy. Take my advice and make the
most of your vogue," he added, with good humor, which masked the
extreme insolence of the speech. "But have you yourself a copy of the
paper? Have you seen your article in print?"

"Not yet," said
Lucien, "though this is the first long piece of prose which I have
published; but Hector will have sent a copy to my address in the Rue
Charlot."

"The first-fruits of your pen belong to me, as you well know," she
laughed.

Dauriat
was unwontedly courtier-like and complimentary. He was afraid of
Lucien, and therefore he asked him to a great dinner which he was
giving to a party of journalists towards the end of the week, and
Coralie was included in the invitation. He took the _Marguerites_ away
with him when he went, asking _his_ poet to look in when he pleased in
the Wooden Galleries, and the agreement should be ready for his
signature. Dauriat never forgot the royal airs with which he endeavored
to overawe superficial observers, and to impress them with the notion
that he was a Maecenas rather than a publisher; at this moment he left
the three thousand francs, waving away in lordly fashion the receipt
which Lucien offered, kissed Coralie's hand, and took his departure.

"Well,
dear love, would you have seen many of these bits of paper if you had
stopped in your hole in the Rue de Cluny, prowling about among the
musty old books in the Bibliotheque de Sainte-Genevieve?" asked
Coralie, for she knew the whole story of Lucien's life by this time.
"Those little friends of yours in the Rue des Quatre-Vents are great
ninnies, it seems to me."

His brothers of the _cenacle_! And Lucien could hear the verdict and
laugh.

He
had seen himself in print; he had just experienced the ineffable joy of
the author, that first pleasurable thrill of gratified vanity which
comes but once. The full import and bearing of his article became
apparent to him as he read and re-read it. The garb of print is to
manuscript as the stage is to women; it brings beauties and defects to
light, killing and giving life; the fine thoughts and the faults alike
stare you in the face.

Lucien, in his excitement and rapture,
gave not another thought to Nathan. Nathan was a stepping-stone for
him--that was all; and he (Lucien) was happy exceedingly--he thought
himself rich. The money brought by Dauriat was a very Potosi for the
lad who used to go about unnoticed through the streets of Angouleme and
down the steep path into L'Houmeau to Postel's garret, where his whole
family had lived upon an income of twelve hundred francs. The pleasures
of his life in Paris must inevitably dim the memories of those days;
but so keen were they, that, as yet, he seemed to be back again in the
Place du Murier. He thought of Eve, his beautiful, noble sister, of
David his friend, and of his poor mother, and he sent Berenice out to
change one of the notes. While she went he wrote a few lines to his
family, and on the maid's return he sent her to the coach-office with a
packet of five hundred francs addressed to his mother. He could not
trust himself; he wanted to sent the money at once; later he might not
be able to do it. Both Lucien and Coralie looked upon this restitution
as a meritorious action. Coralie put her arms about her lover and
kissed him, and thought him a model son and brother; she could not make
enough of him, for generosity is a trait of character which delights
these kindly creatures, who always carry their hearts in their hands.

"We have a dinner now every day for a week," she said; "we will make a
little carnival; you have worked quite hard enough."

Coralie,
fain to delight in the beauty of a man whom all other women should envy
her, took Lucien back to Staub. He was not dressed finely enough for
her. Thence the lovers went to drive in the Bois de Boulogne, and came
back to dine at Mme. du Val-Noble's. Rastignac, Bixiou, des Lupeaulx,
Finot, Blondet, Vignon, the Baron de Nucingen, Beaudenord, Philippe
Bridau, Conti, the great musician, all the artists and speculators, all
the men who seek for violent sensations as a relief from immense
labors, gave Lucien a welcome among them. And Lucien had gained
confidence; he gave himself out in talk as though he had not to live by
his wit, and was pronounced to be a "clever fellow" in the slang of the
coterie of semi-comrades.

"Oh! we must wait and see what he has
in him," said Theodore Gaillard, a poet patronized by the Court, who
thought of starting a Royalist paper to be entitled the _Reveil_ at a
later day.

After dinner, Merlin and Lucien, Coralie and Mme. du
Val-Noble, went to the Opera, where Merlin had a box. The whole party
adjourned thither, and Lucien triumphant reappeared upon the scene of
his first serious check.

He walked in the lobby, arm in arm with
Merlin and Blondet, looking the dandies who had once made merry at his
expense between the eyes. Chatelet was under his feet. He clashed
glances with de Marsay, Vandenesse, and Manerville, the bucks of that
day. And indeed Lucien, beautiful and elegantly arrayed, had caused a
discussion in the Marquise d'Espard's box; Rastignac had paid a long
visit, and the Marquise and Mme. de Bargeton put up their opera-glasses
at Coralie. Did the sight of Lucien send a pang of regret through Mme.
de Bargeton's heart? This thought was uppermost in the poet's mind. The
longing for revenge aroused in him by the sight of the Corinne of
Angouleme was as fierce as on that day when the lady and her cousin had
cut him in the Champs-Elysees.

"Did you bring an amulet with you
from the provinces?"--It was Blondet who made this inquiry some few
days later, when he called at eleven o'clock in the morning and found
that Lucien was not yet risen.--"His good looks are making ravages from
cellar to garret, high and low," continued Blondet, kissing Coralie on
the forehead. "I have come to enlist you, dear fellow," he continued,
grasping Lucien by the hand. "Yesterday, at the Italiens, the Comtesse
de Montcornet asked me to bring you to her house. You will not give a
refusal to a charming woman? You meet people of the first fashion
there."

"If Lucien is nice, he will not go to see your
Countess," put in Coralie. "What call is there for him to show his face
in fine society? He would only be bored there."

"Have you a vested interest in him? Are you jealous of fine ladies?"

"Yes," cried Coralie. "They are worse than we are."

"How do you know that, my pet?" asked Blondet.

"From their husbands," retorted she. "You are forgetting that I once
had six months of de Marsay."

"Do
you suppose, child, that _I_ am particularly anxious to take such a
handsome fellow as your poet to Mme. de Montcornet's house? If you
object, let us consider that nothing has been said. But I don't fancy
that the women are so much in question as a poor devil that Lucien
pilloried in his newspaper; he is begging for mercy and peace. The
Baron du Chatelet is imbecile enough to take the thing seriously. The
Marquise d'Espard, Mme. de Bargeton, and Mme. de Montcornet's set have
taken up the Heron's cause; and I have undertaken to reconcile Petrarch
and his Laura--Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien."

"Aha!" cried
Lucien, the glow of the intoxication of revenge throbbing full-pulsed
through every vein. "Aha! so my foot is on their necks! You make me
adore my pen, worship my friends, bow down to the fate-dispensing power
of the press. I have not written a single sentence as yet upon the
Heron and the Cuttlefish-bone.--I will go with you, my boy," he cried,
catching Blondet by the waist; "yes, I will go; but first, the couple
shall feel the weight of _this_, for so light as it is." He flourished
the pen which had written the article upon Nathan.

"To-morrow,"
he cried, "I will hurl a couple of columns at their heads. Then, we
shall see. Don't be frightened, Coralie, it is not love but revenge;
revenge! And I will have it to the full!"

"What a man it is!"
said Blondet. "If you but knew, Lucien, how rare such explosions are in
this jaded Paris, you might appreciate yourself. You will be a precious
scamp" (the actual expression was a trifle stronger); "you are in a
fair way to be a power in the land."

"He will get on," said Coralie.

"Well, he has come a good way already in six weeks."

"And
if he should climb so high that he can reach a sceptre by treading over
a corpse, he shall have Coralie's body for a stepping-stone," said the
girl.

"You are a pair of lovers of the Golden Age," said
Blondet.--"I congratulate you on your big article," he added, turning
to Lucien. "There were a lot of new things in it. You are past master!"

Lousteau
called with Hector Merlin and Vernou. Lucien was immensely flattered by
this attention. Felicien Vernou brought a hundred francs for Lucien's
article; it was felt that such a contributor must be well paid to
attach him to the paper.

Coralie, looking round at the chapter
of journalists, ordered in a breakfast from the _Cadran bleu_, the
nearest restaurant, and asked her visitors to adjourn to her handsomely
furnished dining-room when Berenice announced that the meal was ready.
In the middle of the repast, when the champagne had gone to all heads,
the motive of the visit came out.

"You do not mean to make an
enemy of Nathan, do you?" asked Lousteau. "Nathan is a journalist, and
he has friends; he might play you an ugly trick with your first book.
You have your _Archer of Charles IX._ to sell, have you not? We went
round to Nathan this morning; he is in a terrible way. But you will set
about another article, and puff praise in his face."

"What! After my article against his book, would you have me say----"
began Lucien.

The whole party cut him short with a shout of laughter.

"Did you ask him to supper here the day after to-morrow?" asked Blondet.

"You
article was not signed," added Lousteau. "Felicien, not being quite
such a new hand as you are, was careful to put an initial C at the
bottom. You can do that now with all your articles in his paper, which
is pure unadulterated Left. We are all of us in the Opposition.
Felicien was tactful enough not to compromise your future opinions.
Hector's shop is Right Centre; you might sign your work on it with an
L. If you cut a man up, you do it anonymously; if you praise him, it is
just as well to put your name to your article."

"It is not the signatures that trouble me," returned Lucien, "but I
cannot see anything to be said in favor of the book."

"Then did you really think as you wrote?" asked Hector.

"Yes."

"Oh!
I thought you were cleverer than that, youngster," said Blondet. "No.
Upon my word, as I looked at that forehead of yours, I credited you
with the omnipotence of the great mind--the power of seeing both sides
of everything. In literature, my boy, every idea is reversible, and no
man can take upon himself to decide which is the right or wrong side.
Everything is bi-lateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary.
Janus is a fable signifying criticism and the symbol of Genius. The
Almighty alone is triform. What raises Moliere and Corneille above the
rest of us but the faculty of saying one thing with an Alceste or an
Octave, and another with a Philinte or a Cinna? Rousseau wrote a letter
against dueling in the _Nouvelle_ Heloise, and another in favor of it.
Which of the two represented his own opinion? will you venture to take
it upon yourself to decide? Which of us could give judgement for
Clarissa or Lovelace, Hector or Achilles? Who was Homer's hero? What
did Richardson himself think? It is the function of criticism to look
at a man's work in all its aspects. We draw up our case, in short."

"Do
you really stick to your written opinions?" asked Vernou, with a
satirical expression. "Why, we are retailers of phrases; that is how we
make a livelihood. When you try to do a good piece of work--to write a
book, in short--you can put your thoughts, yourself into it, and cling
to it, and fight for it; but as for newspaper articles, read to-day and
forgotten to-morrow, they are worth nothing in my eyes but the money
that is paid for them. If you attach any importance to such drivel, you
might as well make the sign of the Cross and invoke heaven when you sit
down to write a tradesman's circular."

Every one apparently was
astonished at Lucien's scruples. The last rags of the boyish conscience
were torn away, and he was invested with the _toga virilis_ of
journalism.

"Do you know what Nathan said by way of comforting himself after your
criticism?" asked Lousteau.

"How should I know?"

"Nathan
exclaimed, 'Paragraphs pass away; but a great work lives!' He will be
here to supper in two days, and he will be sure to fall flat at your
feet, and kiss your claws, and swear that you are a great man."

"That would be a funny thing," was Lucien's comment.

"_Funny_" repeated Blondet. "He can't help himself."

"I am quite willing, my friends," said Lucien, on whom the wine had
begun to take effect. "But what am I to say?"

"Oh
well, refute yourself in three good columns in Merlin's paper. We have
been enjoying the sight of Nathan's wrath; we have just been telling
him that he owes us no little gratitude for getting up a hot
controversy that will sell his second edition in a week. In his eyes at
this present moment you are a spy, a scoundrel, a caitiff wretch; the
day after to-morrow you will be a genius, an uncommonly clever fellow,
one of Plutarch's men. Nathan will hug you and call you his best
friend. Dauriat has been to see you; you have your three thousand
francs; you have worked the trick! Now you want Nathan's respect and
esteem. Nobody ought to be let in except the publisher. We must not
immolate any one but an enemy. We should not talk like this if it were
a question of some outsider, some inconvenient person who had made a
name for himself without us and was not wanted; but Nathan is one of
us. Blondet got some one to attack him in the _Mercure_ for the
pleasure of replying in the _Debats_. For which reason the first
edition went off at once."

"My friends, upon my word and honor, I cannot write two words in praise
of that book----"

"You
will have another hundred francs," interrupted Merlin. "Nathan will
have brought you in ten louis d'or, to say nothing of an article that
you might put in Finot's paper; you would get a hundred francs for
writing that, and another hundred francs from Dauriat--total, twenty
louis."

"But what am I to say?"

"Here is your way out of
the difficulty," said Blondet, after some thought. "Say that the envy
that fastens on all good work, like wasps on ripe fruit, has attempted
to set its fangs in this production. The captious critic, trying his
best to find fault, has been obliged to invent theories for that
purpose, and has drawn a distinction between two kinds of
literature--'the literature of ideas and the literature of imagery,' as
he calls them. On the heads of that, youngster, say that to give
expression to ideas through imagery is the highest form of art. Try to
show that all poetry is summed up in that, and lament that there is so
little poetry in French; quote foreign criticisms on the unimaginative
precision of our style, and then extol M. de Canalis and Nathan for the
services they have done France by infusing a less prosaic spirit into
the language. Knock your previous argument to pieces by calling
attention to the fact that we have made progress since the eighteenth
century. (Discover the 'progress,' a beautiful word to mystify the
bourgeois public.) Say that the new methods in literature concentrate
all styles, comedy and tragedy, description, character-drawing and
dialogues, in a series of pictures set in the brilliant frame of a plot
which holds the reader's interest. The Novel, which demands sentiment,
style, and imagery, is the greatest creation of modern days; it is the
successor of stage comedy grown obsolete with its restrictions. Facts
and ideas are all within the province of fiction. The intellect of an
incisive moralist, like La Bruyere, the power of treating character as
Moliere could treat it, the grand machinery of a Shakespeare, together
with the portrayal of the most subtle shades of passion (the one
treasury left untouched by our predecessors)--for all this the modern
novel affords free scope. How far superior is all this to the
cut-and-dried logic-chopping, the cold analysis to the eighteenth
century!--'The Novel,' say sententiously, 'is the Epic grown amusing.'
Instance _Corinne_, bring Mme. de Stael up to support your argument.
The eighteenth century called all things in question; it is the task of
the nineteenth to conclude and speak the last word; and the last word
of the nineteenth century has been for realities--realities which live
however and move. Passion, in short, an element unknown in Voltaire's
philosophy, has been brought into play. Here a diatribe against
Voltaire, and as for Rousseau, his characters are polemics and systems
masquerading. Julie and Claire are entelechies--informing spirit
awaiting flesh and bones.

"You might slip off on a side issue at
this, and say that we owe a new and original literature to the Peace
and the Restoration of the Bourbons, for you are writing for a Right
Centre paper.

"Scoff at Founders of Systems. And cry with a glow
of fine enthusiasm, 'Here are errors and misleading statements in
abundance in our contemporary's work, and to what end? To depreciate a
fine work, to deceive the public, and to arrive at this conclusion--"A
book that sells, does not sell."' _Proh pudor_! (Mind you put _Proh
pudor_! 'tis a harmless expletive that stimulates the reader's
interest.) Foresee the approaching decadence of criticism, in fact.
Moral--'There is but one kind of literature, the literature which aims
to please. Nathan has started upon a new way; he understands his epoch
and fulfils the requirements of his age--the demand for drama, the
natural demand of a century in which the political stage has become a
permanent puppet show. Have we not seen four dramas in a score of
years--the Revolution, the Directory, the Empire, and the Restoration?'
With that, wallow in dithyramb and eulogy, and the second edition shall
vanish like smoke. This is the way to do it. Next Saturday put a review
in our magazine, and sign it 'de Rubempre,' out in full.

"In
that final article say that 'fine work always brings about abundant
controversy. This week such and such a paper contained such and such an
article on Nathan's book, and such another paper made a vigorous
reply.' Then you criticise the critics 'C' and 'L'; pay me a passing
compliment on the first article in the _Debats_, and end by averring
that Nathan's work is the great book of the epoch; which is all as if
you said nothing at all; they say the same of everything that comes out.

"And
so," continued Blondet, "you will have made four hundred francs in a
week, to say nothing of the pleasure of now and again saying what you
really think. A discerning public will maintain that either C or L or
Rubempre is in the right of it, or mayhap all the three. Mythology,
beyond doubt one of the grandest inventions of the human brain, places
Truth at the bottom of a well; and what are we to do without buckets?
You will have supplied the public with three for one. There you are, my
boy, Go ahead!"

Lucien's head was swimming with bewilderment. Blondet kissed him on
both cheeks.

"I
am going to my shop," said he. And every man likewise departed to his
shop. For these "_hommes forts_," a newspaper office was nothing but a
shop.

They were to meet again in the evening at the Wooden
Galleries, and Lucien would sign his treaty of peace with Dauriat.
Florine and Lousteau, Lucien and Coralie, Blondet and Finot, were to
dine at the Palais-Royal; du Bruel was giving the manager of the
Panorama-Dramatique a dinner.

"They are right," exclaimed
Lucien, when he was alone with Coralie. "Men are made to be tools in
the hands of stronger spirits. Four hundred francs for three articles!
Doguereau would scarcely give me as much for a book which cost me two
years of work."

"Write criticism," said Coralie, "have a good
time! Look at me, I am an Andalusian girl to-night, to-morrow I may be
a gypsy, and a man the night after. Do as I do, give them grimaces for
their money, and let us live happily."

Lucien, smitten with love
of Paradox, set himself to mount and ride that unruly hybrid product of
Pegasus and Balaam's ass; started out at a gallop over the fields of
thought while he took a turn in the Bois, and discovered new
possibilities in Blondet's outline.

He dined as happy people
dine, and signed away all his rights in the _Marguerites_. It never
occurred to him that any trouble might arise from that transaction in
the future. He took a turn of work at the office, wrote off a couple of
columns, and came back to the Rue de Vendome. Next morning he found the
germs of yesterday's ideas had sprung up and developed in his brain, as
ideas develop while the intellect is yet unjaded and the sap is rising;
and thoroughly did he enjoy the projection of this new article. He
threw himself into it with enthusiasm. At the summons of the spirit of
contradiction, new charms met beneath his pen. He was witty and
satirical, he rose to yet new views of sentiment, of ideas and imagery
in literature. With subtle ingenuity, he went back to his own first
impressions of Nathan's work, when he read it in the newsroom of the
Cour du Commerce; and the ruthless, bloodthirsty critic, the lively
mocker, became a poet in the final phrases which rose and fell with
majestic rhythm like the swaying censer before the altar.

The
mood was upon him; he went on to indite, stroke by stroke, the promised
terrible article on Chatelet and Mme. de Bargeton. That morning he
experienced one of the keenest personal pleasures of journalism; he
knew what it was to forge the epigram, to whet and polish the cold
blade to be sheathed in a victim's heart, to make of the hilt a cunning
piece of workmanship for the reader to admire. For the public admires
the handle, the delicate work of the brain, while the cruelty is not
apparent; how should the public know that the steel of the epigram,
tempered in the fire of revenge, has been plunged deftly, to rankle in
the very quick of a victim's vanity, and is reeking from wounds
innumerable which it has inflicted? It is a hideous joy, that grim,
solitary pleasure, relished without witnesses; it is like a duel with
an absent enemy, slain at a distance by a quill; a journalist might
really possess the magical power of talismans in Eastern tales. Epigram
is distilled rancor, the quintessence of a hate derived from all the
worst passions of man, even as love concentrates all that is best in
human nature. The man does not exist who cannot be witty to avenge
himself; and, by the same rule, there is not one to whom love does not
bring delight. Cheap and easy as this kind of wit may be in France, it
is always relished. Lucien's article was destined to raise the previous
reputation of the paper for venomous spite and evil-speaking. His
article probed two hearts to the depths; it dealt a grievous wound to
Mme. de Bargeton, his Laura of old days, as well as to his rival, the
Baron du Chatelet.

"Well, let us go for a drive in the Bois," said Coralie, "the horses
are fidgeting. There is no need to kill yourself."

"We
will take the article on Nathan to Hector. Journalism is really very
much like Achilles' lance, it salves the wounds that it makes," said
Lucien, correcting a phrase here and there.

The lovers started
forth in splendor to show themselves to the Paris which had but lately
given Lucien the cold shoulder, and now was beginning to talk about
him. To have Paris talking of you! and this after you have learned how
large the great city is, how hard it is to be anybody there--it was
this thought that turned Lucien's head with exultation.

"Let us
go by way of your tailor's, dear boy, and tell him to be quick with
your clothes, or try them on if they are ready. If you are going to
your fine ladies' houses, you shall eclipse that monster of a de Marsay
and young Rastignac and any Ajuda-Pinto or Maxime de Trailles or
Vandenesse of them all. Remember that your mistress is Coralie! But you
will not play me any tricks, eh?"

Two days afterwards, on the
eve of the supper-party at Coralie's house, there was a new play at the
Ambigu, and it fell to Lucien to write the dramatic criticism. Lucien
and Coralie walked together after dinner from the Rue de Vendome to the
Panorama-Dramatique, going along the Cafe Turc side of the Boulevard du
Temple, a lounge much frequented at that time. People wondered at his
luck, and praised Coralie's beauty. Chance remarks reached his ears;
some said that Coralie was the finest woman in Paris, others that
Lucien was a match for her. The romantic youth felt that he was in his
atmosphere. This was the life for him. The brotherhood was so far away
that it was almost out of sight. Only two months ago, how he had looked
up to those lofty great natures; now he asked himself if they were not
just a trifle ridiculous with their notions and their Puritanism.
Coralie's careless words had lodged in Lucien's mind, and begun already
to bear fruit. He took Coralie to her dressing-room, and strolled about
like a sultan behind the scenes; the actresses gave him burning glances
and flattering speeches.

"I must go to the Ambigu and attend to business," said he.

At
the Ambigu the house was full; there was not a seat left for him.
Indignant complaints behind the scenes brought no redress; the
box-office keeper, who did not know him as yet, said that they had sent
orders for two boxes to his paper, and sent him about his business.

"I shall speak of the play as I find it," said Lucien, nettled at this.

"What a dunce you are!" said the leading lady, addressing the
box-office keeper, "that is Coralie's adorer."

The box-office keeper turned round immediately at this. "I will speak
to the manager at once, sir," he said.

In
all these small details Lucien saw the immense power wielded by the
press. His vanity was gratified. The manager appeared to say that the
Duc de Rhetore and Tullia the opera-dancer were in the stage-box, and
they had consented to allow Lucien to join them.

"You have
driven two people to distraction," remarked the young Duke, mentioning
the names of the Baron du Chatelet and Mme. de Bargeton.

"Distraction?
What will it be to-morrow?" said Lucien. "So far, my friends have been
mere skirmishers, but I have given them red-hot shot to-night.
To-morrow you will know why we are making game of 'Potelet.' The
article is called 'Potelet from 1811 to 1821.' Chatelet will be a
byword, a name for the type of courtiers who deny their benefactor and
rally to the Bourbons. When I have done with him, I am going to Mme. de
Montcornet's."

Lucien's talk was sparkling. He was eager that
this great personage should see how gross a mistake Mesdames d'Espard
and de Bargeton had made when they slighted Lucien de Rubempre. But he
showed the tip of his ear when he asserted his right to bear the name
of Rubempre, the Duc de Rhetore having purposely addressed him as
Chardon.

"You should go over to the Royalists," said the Duke.
"You have proved yourself a man of ability; now show your good sense.
The one way of obtaining a patent of nobility and the right to bear the
title of your mother's family, is by asking for it in return for
services to be rendered to the Court. The Liberals will never make a
count of you. The Restoration will get the better of the press, you
see, in the long run, and the press is the only formidable power. They
have borne with it too long as it is; the press is sure to be muzzled.
Take advantage of the last moments of liberty to make yourself
formidable, and you will have everything--intellect, nobility, and good
looks; nothing will be out of your reach. So if you are a Liberal, let
it be simply for the moment, so that you can make a better bargain for
your Royalism."

With that the Duke entreated Lucien to accept an
invitation to dinner, which the German Minister (of Florine's
supper-party) was about to send. Lucien fell under the charm of the
noble peer's arguments; the salons from which he had been exiled for
ever, as he thought, but a few months ago, would shortly open their
doors for him! He was delighted. He marveled at the power of the press;
Intellect and the Press, these then were the real powers in society.
Another thought shaped itself in his mind--Was Etienne Lousteau sorry
that he had opened the gate of the temple to a newcomer? Even now he
(Lucien) felt on his own account that it was strongly advisable to put
difficulties in the way of eager and ambitious recruits from the
provinces. If a poet should come to him as he had flung himself into
Etienne's arms, he dared not think of the reception that he would give
him.

The youthful Duke meanwhile saw that Lucien was deep in
thought, and made a pretty good guess at the matter of his meditations.
He himself had opened out wide horizons of public life before an
ambitious poet, with a vacillating will, it is true, but not without
aspirations; and the journalists had already shown the neophyte, from a
pinnacle of the temple, all the kingdoms of the world of letters and
its riches.

Lucien himself had no suspicion of a little plot
that was being woven, nor did he imagine that M. de Rhetore had a hand
in it. M. de Rhetore had spoken of Lucien's cleverness, and Mme.
d'Espard's set had taken alarm. Mme. de Bargeton had commissioned the
Duke to sound Lucien, and with that object in view, the noble youth had
come to the Ambigu-Comique.

Do not believe in stories of
elaborate treachery. Neither the great world nor the world of
journalists laid any deep schemes; definite plans are not made by
either; their Machiavelism lives from hand to mouth, so to speak, and
consists, for the most part, in being always on the spot, always on the
alert to turn everything to account, always on the watch for the moment
when a man's ruling passion shall deliver him into the hands of his
enemies. The young Duke had seen through Lucien at Florine's
supper-party; he had just touched his vain susceptibilities; and now he
was trying his first efforts in diplomacy upon the living subject.

Lucien
hurried to the Rue Saint-Fiacre after the play to write his article. It
was a piece of savage and bitter criticism, written in pure wantonness;
he was amusing himself by trying his power. The melodrama, as a matter
of fact, was a better piece than the _Alcalde_; but Lucien wished to
see whether he could damn a good play and send everybody to see a bad
one, as his associates had said.

He unfolded the sheet at
breakfast next morning, telling Coralie as he did so that he had cut up
the Ambigu-Comique; and not a little astonished was he to find below
his paper on Mme. de Bargeton and Chatelet a notice of the Ambigu, so
mellowed and softened in the course of the night, that although the
witty analysis was still preserved, the judgment was favorable. The
article was more likely to fill the house than to empty it. No words
can describe his wrath. He determined to have a word or two with
Lousteau. He had already begun to think himself an indespensable man,
and he vowed that he would not submit to be tyrannized over and treated
like a fool. To establish his power beyond cavil, he wrote the article
for Dauriat's review, summing up and weighing all the various opinions
concerning Nathan's book; and while he was in the humor, he hit off
another of his short sketches for Lousteau's newspaper. Inexperienced
journalists, in the first effervescence of youth, make a labor of love
of ephemeral work, and lavish their best thought unthriftily thereon.

The
manager of the Panorama-Dramatique gave a first performance of a
vaudeville that night, so that Florine and Coralie might be free for
the evening. There were to be cards before supper. Lousteau came for
the short notice of the vaudeville; it had been written beforehand
after the general rehearsal, for Etienne wished to have the paper off
his mind. Lucien read over one of the charming sketches of Parisian
whimsicalities which made the fortune of the paper, and Lousteau kissed
him on both eyelids, and called him the providence of journalism.

"Then
why do you amuse yourself by turning my article inside out?" asked
Lucien. He had written his brilliant sketch simply and solely to give
emphasis to his grievance.

"_I_?" exclaimed Lousteau.

"Well, who else can have altered my article?"

"You
do not know all the ins and outs yet, dear fellow. The Ambigu pays for
thirty copies, and only takes nine for the manager and box
office-keeper and their mistresses, and for the three lessees of the
theatre. Every one of the Boulevard theatres pays eight hundred francs
in this way to the paper; and there is quite as much again in boxes and
orders for Finot, to say nothing of the contributions of the company.
And if the minor theatres do this, you may imagine what the big ones
do! Now you understand? We are bound to show a good deal of indulgence."

"I understand this, that I am not at liberty to write as I think----"

"Eh!
what does that matter, so long as you turn an honest penny?" cried
Lousteau. "Besides, my boy, what grudge had you against the theatre?
You must have had some reason for it, or you would not have cut up the
play as you did. If you slash for the sake of slashing, the paper will
get into trouble, and when there is good reason for hitting hard it
will not tell. Did the manager leave you out in the cold?"

"He had not kept a place for me."

"Good,"
said Lousteau. "I shall let him see your article, and tell him that I
softened it down; you will find it serves you better than if it had
appeared in print. Go and ask him for tickets to-morrow, and he will
sign forty blank orders every month. I know a man who can get rid of
them for you; I will introduce you to him, and he will buy them all up
at half-price. There is a trade done in theatre tickets, just as Barbet
trades in reviewers' copies. This is another Barbet, the leader of the
_claque_. He lives near by; come and see him, there is time enough."

"But, my dear fellow, it is a scandalous thing that Finot should levy
blackmail in matters intellectual. Sooner or later----"

"Really!"
cried Lousteau, "where do you come from? For what do you take Finot?
Beneath his pretence of good-nature, his ignorance and stupidity, and
those Turcaret's airs of his, there is all the cunning of his father
the hatter. Did you notice an old soldier of the Empire in the den at
the office? That is Finot's uncle. The uncle is not only one of the
right sort, he has the luck to be taken for a fool; and he takes all
that kind of business upon his shoulders. An ambitious man in Paris is
well off indeed if he has a willing scapegoat at hand. In public life,
as in journalism, there are hosts of emergencies in which the chiefs
cannot afford to appear. If Finot should enter on a political career,
his uncle would be his secretary, and receive all the contributions
levied in his department on big affairs. Anybody would take Giroudeau
for a fool at first sight, but he has just enough shrewdness to be an
inscrutable old file. He is on picket duty; he sees that we are not
pestered with hubbub, beginners wanting a job, or advertisements. No
other paper has his equal, I think."

"He plays his part well," said Lucien; "I saw him at work."

Etienne and Lucien reached a handsome house in the Rue du
Faubourg-du-Temple.

"Is M. Braulard in?" Etienne asked of the porter.

"_Monsieur_?" said Lucien. "Then, is the leader of the _claque_
'Monsieur'?"

"My
dear boy, Braulard has twenty thousand francs of income. All the
dramatic authors of the Boulevards are in his clutches, and have a
standing account with him as if he were a banker. Orders and
complimentary tickets are sold here. Braulard knows where to get rid of
such merchandise. Now for a turn at statistics, a useful science enough
in its way. At the rate of fifty complimentary tickets every evening
for each theatre, you have two hundred and fifty tickets daily.
Suppose, taking one with another, that they are worth a couple of
francs apiece, Braulard pays a hundred and twenty-five francs daily for
them, and takes his chance of making cent per cent. In this way
authors' tickets alone bring him in about four thousand francs every
month, or forty-eight thousand francs per annum. Allow twenty thousand
francs for loss, for he cannot always place all his tickets----"

"Why not?"

"Oh!
the people who pay at the door go in with the holders of complimentary
tickets for unreserved seats, and the theatre reserves the right of
admitting those who pay. There are fine warm evenings to be reckoned
with besides, and poor plays. Braulard makes, perhaps, thirty thousand
francs every year in this way, and he has his _claqueurs_ besides,
another industry. Florine and Coralie pay tribute to him; if they did
not, there would be no applause when they come on or go off."

Lousteau gave this explanation in a low voice as they went up the stair.

"Paris is a queer place," said Lucien; it seemed to him that he saw
self-interest squatting in every corner.

A
smart maid-servant opened the door. At the sight of Etienne Lousteau,
the dealer in orders and tickets rose from a sturdy chair before a
large cylinder desk, and Lucien beheld the leader of the _claque_,
Braulard himself, dressed in a gray molleton jacket, footed trousers,
and red slippers; for all the world like a doctor or a solicitor. He
was a typical self-made man, Lucien thought--a vulgar-looking face with
a pair of exceedingly cunning gray eyes, hands made for hired applause,
a complexion over which hard living had passed like rain over a roof,
grizzled hair, and a somewhat husky voice.

"You have come from
Mlle. Florine, no doubt, sir, and this gentleman for Mlle. Coralie,"
said Braulard; "I know you very well by sight. Don't trouble yourself,
sir," he continued, addressing Lucien; "I am buying the Gymnase
connection, I will look after your lady, and I will give her notice of
any tricks they may try to play on her."

"That is not an offer
to be refused, my dear Braulard, but we have come about the press
orders for the Boulevard theatres--I as editor, and this gentleman as
dramatic critic."

"Oh!--ah, yes! Finot has sold his paper. I
heard about it. He is getting on, is Finot. I have asked him to dine
with me at the end of the week; if you will do me the honor and
pleasure of coming, you may bring your ladies, and there will be a
grand jollification. Adele Dupuis is coming, and Ducange, and Frederic
du Petit-Mere, and Mlle. Millot, my mistress. We shall have good fun
and better liquor."

"Ducange must be in difficulties. He has lost his lawsuit."

"I
have lent him ten thousand francs; if _Calas_ succeeds, it will repay
the loan, so I have been organizing a success. Ducange is a clever man;
he has brains----"

Lucien fancied that he must be dreaming when he heard a _claqueur_
appraising a writer's value.

"Coralie
has improved," continued Braulard, with the air of a competent critic.
"If she is a good girl, I will take her part, for they have got up a
cabal against her at the Gymnase. This is how I mean to do it. I will
have a few well-dressed men in the balconies to smile and make a little
murmur, and the applause will follow. That is a dodge which makes a
position for an actress. I have a liking for Coralie, and you ought to
be satisfied, for she has feeling. Aha! I can hiss any one on the stage
if I like."

"But let us settle this business about the tickets," put in Lousteau.

"Very
well, I will come to this gentleman's lodging for them at the beginning
of the month. He is a friend of yours, and I will treat him as I do
you. You have five theatres; you will get thirty tickets--that will be
something like seventy-five francs a month. Perhaps you will be wanting
an advance?" added Braulard, lifting a cash-box full of coin out of his
desk.

"No, no," said Lousteau; "we will keep that shift against a rainy day."

"I
will work with Coralie, sir, and we will come to an understanding,"
said Braulard, addressing Lucien, who was looking about him, not
without profound astonishment. There was a bookcase in Braulard's
study, there were framed engravings and good furniture; and as they
passed through the drawing room, he noticed that the fittings were
neither too luxurious nor yet mean. The dining-room seemed to be the
best ordered room, he remarked on this jokingly.

"But Braulard
is an epicure," said Lousteau; "his dinners are famous in dramatic
literature, and they are what you might expect from his cash-box."

"I
have good wine," Braulard replied modestly.--"Ah! here are my
lamplighters," he added, as a sound of hoarse voices and strange
footsteps came up from the staircase.

Lucien on his way down saw
a march past of _claqueurs_ and retailers of tickets. It was an ill
smelling squad, attired in caps, seedy trousers, and threadbare
overcoats; a flock of gallows-birds with bluish and greenish tints in
their faces, neglected beards, and a strange mixture of savagery and
subservience in their eyes. A horrible population lives and swarms upon
the Paris boulevards; selling watch guards and brass jewelry in the
streets by day, applauding under the chandeliers of the theatre at
night, and ready to lend themselves to any dirty business in the great
city.

"Behold the Romans!" laughed Lousteau; "behold fame
incarnate for actresses and dramatic authors. It is no prettier than
our own when you come to look at it close."

"It is difficult to
keep illusions on any subject in Paris," answered Lucien as they turned
in at his door. "There is a tax upon everything --everything has its
price, and anything can be made to order--even success."

Thirty
guests were assembled that evening in Coralie's rooms, her dining room
would not hold more. Lucien had asked Dauriat and the manager of the
Panorama-Dramatique, Matifat and Florine, Camusot, Lousteau, Finot,
Nathan, Hector Merlin and Mme. du Val-Noble, Felicien Vernou, Blondet,
Vignon, Philippe Bridau, Mariette, Giroudeau, Cardot and Florentine,
and Bixiou. He had also asked all his friends of the Rue des
Quatre-Vents. Tullia the dancer, who was not unkind, said gossip, to du
Bruel, had come without her duke. The proprietors of the newspapers,
for whom most of the journalists wrote, were also of the party.

At
eight o'clock, when the lights of the candles in the chandeliers shone
over the furniture, the hangings, and the flowers, the rooms wore the
festal air that gives to Parisian luxury the appearance of a dream; and
Lucien felt indefinable stirrings of hope and gratified vanity and
pleasure at the thought that he was the master of the house. But how
and by whom the magic wand had been waved he no longer sought to
remember. Florine and Coralie, dressed with the fanciful extravagance
and magnificent artistic effect of the stage, smiled on the poet like
two fairies at the gates of the Palace of Dreams. And Lucien was almost
in a dream.

His life had been changed so suddenly during the
last few months; he had gone so swiftly from the depths of penury to
the last extreme of luxury, that at moments he felt as uncomfortable as
a dreaming man who knows that he is asleep. And yet, he looked round at
the fair reality about him with a confidence to which envious minds
might have given the name of fatuity.

Lucien himself had
changed. He had grown paler during these days of continual enjoyment;
languor had lent a humid look to his eyes; in short, to use Mme.
d'Espard's expression, he looked like a man who is loved. He was the
handsomer for it. Consciousness of his powers and his strength was
visible in his face, enlightened as it was by love and experience.
Looking out over the world of letters and of men, it seemed to him that
he might go to and fro as lord of it all. Sober reflection never
entered his romantic head unless it was driven in by the pressure of
adversity, and just now the present held not a care for him. The breath
of praise swelled the sails of his skiff; all the instruments of
success lay there to his hand; he had an establishment, a mistress whom
all Paris envied him, a carriage, and untold wealth in his inkstand.
Heart and soul and brain were alike transformed within him; why should
he care to be over nice about the means, when the great results were
visibly there before his eyes.

As such a style of living will
seem, and with good reason, to be anything but secure to economists who
have any experience of Paris, it will not be superfluous to give a
glance to the foundation, uncertain as it was, upon which the
prosperity of the pair was based.

Camusot had given Coralie's
tradesmen instructions to grant her credit for three months at least,
and this had been done without her knowledge. During those three
months, therefore, horses and servants, like everything else, waited as
if by enchantment at the bidding of two children, eager for enjoyment,
and enjoying to their hearts' content.

Coralie had taken
Lucien's hand and given him a glimpse of the transformation scene in
the dining-room, of the splendidly appointed table, of chandeliers,
each fitted with forty wax-lights, of the royally luxurious dessert,
and a menu of Chevet's. Lucien kissed her on the forehead and held her
closely to his heart.

"I shall succeed, child," he said, "and then I will repay you for such
love and devotion."

"Pshaw!" said Coralie. "Are you satisfied?"

"I should be very hard to please if I were not."

"Very
well, then, that smile of yours pays for everything," she said, and
with a serpentine movement she raised her head and laid her lips
against his.

When they went back to the others, Florine,
Lousteau, Matifat, and Camusot were setting out the card-tables.
Lucien's friends began to arrive, for already these folk began to call
themselves "Lucien's friends"; and they sat over the cards from nine
o'clock till midnight. Lucien was unacquainted with a single game, but
Lousteau lost a thousand francs, and Lucien could not refuse to lend
him the money when he asked for it.

Michel, Fulgence, and Joseph
appeared about ten o'clock; and Lucien, chatting with them in a corner,
saw that they looked sober and serious enough, not to say ill at ease.
D'Arthez could not come, he was finishing his book; Leon Giraud was
busy with the first number of his review; so the brotherhood had sent
three artists among their number, thinking that they would feel less
out of their element in an uproarious supper party than the rest.

"Well,
my dear fellows," said Lucien, assuming a slightly patronizing tone,
"the 'comical fellow' may become a great public character yet, you see."

"I wish I may be mistaken; I don't ask better," said Michel.

"Are you living with Coralie until you can do better?" asked Fulgence.

"Yes,"
said Lucien, trying to look unconscious. "Coralie had an elderly
adorer, a merchant, and she showed him the door, poor fellow. I am
better off than your brother Philippe," he added, addressing Joseph
Bridau; "he does not know how to manage Mariette."

"You are a man like another now; in short, you will make your way,"
said Fulgence.

"A man that will always be the same for you, under all circumstances,"
returned Lucien.

Michel and Fulgence exchanged incredulous scornful smiles at this.
Lucien saw the absurdity of his remark.

"Beautiful
and good," said Lucien; "she is an angel, upon my word. And you shall
paint her portrait; she shall sit to you if you like for your Venetian
lady brought by the old woman to the senator."

"All women who love are angelic," said Michel Chrestien.

Just
at that moment Raoul Nathan flew upon Lucien, and grasped both his
hands and shook them in a sudden access of violent friendship.

"Oh,
my good friend, you are something more than a great man, you have a
heart," cried he, "a much rarer thing than genius in these days. You
are a devoted friend. I am yours, in short, through thick and thin; I
shall never forget all that you have done for me this week."

Lucien's
joy had reached the highest point; to be thus caressed by a man of whom
everyone was talking! He looked at his three friends of the brotherhood
with something like a superior air. Nathan's appearance upon the scene
was the result of an overture from Merlin, who sent him a proof of the
favorable review to appear in to-morrow's issue.

"I only
consented to write the attack on condition that I should be allowed to
reply to it myself," Lucien said in Nathan's ear. "I am one of you."
This incident was opportune; it justified the remark which amused
Fulgence. Lucien was radiant.

"When d'Arthez's book comes out,"
he said, turning to the three, "I am in a position to be useful to him.
That thought in itself would induce me to remain a journalist."

"Can you do as you like?" Michel asked quickly.

"So far as one can when one is indispensable," said Lucien modestly.

It
was almost midnight when they sat down to supper, and the fun grew fast
and furious. Talk was less restrained in Lucien's house than at
Matifat's, for no one suspected that the representatives of the
brotherhood and the newspaper writers held divergent opinions. Young
intellects, depraved by arguing for either side, now came into conflict
with each other, and fearful axioms of the journalistic jurisprudence,
then in its infancy, hurtled to and fro. Claude Vignon, upholding the
dignity of criticism, inveighed against the tendency of the smaller
newspapers, saying that the writers of personalities lowered themselves
in the end. Lousteau, Merlin, and Finot took up the cudgels for the
system known by the name of _blague_; puffery, gossip, and humbug, said
they, was the test of talent, and set the hall-mark, as it were, upon
it. "Any man who can stand that test has real power," said Lousteau.

"Besides,"
cried Merlin, "when a great man receives ovations, there ought to be a
chorus in insults to balance, as in a Roman triumph."

"Oho!" put in Lucien; "then every one held up to ridicule in print will
fancy that he has made a success."

"Any one would think that the question interested you," exclaimed Finot.

"And how about our sonnets," said Michel Chrestien; "is that the way
they will win us the fame of a second Petrarch?"

"Laura already counts for something in his fame," said Dauriat, a pun
[Laure (l'or)] received with acclamations.

"_Faciamus experimentum in anima vili_," retorted Lucien with a smile.

"And
woe unto him whom reviewers shall spare, flinging him crowns at his
first appearance, for he shall be shelved like the saints in their
shrines, and no man shall pay him the slightest attention," said Vernou.

"People
will say, 'Look elsewhere, simpleton; you have had your due already,'
as Champcenetz said to the Marquis de Genlis, who was looking too
fondly at his wife," added Blondet.

"Success is the ruin of a
man in France," said Finot. "We are so jealous of one another that we
try to forget, and to make others forget, the triumphs of yesterday."

"Contradiction is the life of literature, in fact," said Claude Vignon.

"In art as in nature, there are two principles everywhere at strife,"
exclaimed Fulgence; "and victory for either means death."

"So it is with politics," added Michel Chrestien.

"We
have a case in point," said Lousteau. "Dauriat will sell a couple of
thousand copies of Nathan's book in the coming week. And why? Because
the book that was cleverly attacked will be ably defended."

Merlin took up the proof of to-morrow's paper. "How can such an article
fail to sell an edition?" he asked.

"Read the article," said Dauriat. "I am a publisher wherever I am, even
at supper."

"How could that article have been written unless the attack had
preceded it?" asked Lousteau.

Dauriat
drew the proof of the third article from his pocket and read it over,
Finot listening closely; for it was to appear in the second number of
his own review, and as editor he exaggerated his enthusiasm.

"Gentlemen," said he, "so and not otherwise would Bossuet have written
if he had lived in our day."

"I am sure of it," said Merlin. "Bossuet would have been a journalist
to-day."

"Is it a nickname?" Merlin inquired, looking maliciously from Finot to
Lucien.

"If
you go on at this pace, you will be quite beyond us," said Dauriat;
"these gentlemen" (indicating Camusot and Matifat) "cannot follow you
as it is. A joke is like a bit of thread; if it is spun too fine, it
breaks, as Bonaparte said."

"Gentlemen," said Lousteau, "we have
been eye-witnesses of a strange, portentous, unheard-of, and truly
surprising phenomenon. Admire the rapidity with which our friend here
has been transformed from a provincial into a journalist!"

"He is a born journalist," said Dauriat.

"Children!"
called Finot, rising to his feet, "all of us here present have
encouraged and protected our amphitryon in his entrance upon a career
in which he has already surpassed our hopes. In two months he has shown
us what he can do in a series of excellent articles known to us all. I
propose to baptize him in form as a journalist."

Coralie
made a sign to Berenice. That portly handmaid went to Coralie's
dressing-room and brought back a box of tumbled artificial flowers. The
more incapable members of the party were grotesquely tricked out in
these blossoms, and a crown of roses was soon woven. Finot, as high
priest, sprinkled a few drops of champagne on Lucien's golden curls,
pronouncing with delicious gravity the words--"In the name of the
Government Stamp, the Caution-money, and the Fine, I baptize thee,
Journalist. May thy articles sit lightly on thee!"

"And may they be paid for, including white lines!" cried Merlin.

Just
at that moment Lucien caught sight of three melancholy faces. Michel
Chrestien, Joseph Bridau, and Fulgence Ridal took up their hats and
went out amid a storm of invective.

"Queer customers!" said Merlin.

"Fulgence used to be a good fellow," added Lousteau, "before they
perverted his morals."

"Who are 'they'?" asked Claude Vignon.

"Some
very serious young men," said Blondet, "who meet at a
philosophico-religious symposium in the Rue des Quatre-Vents, and worry
themselves about the meaning of human life----"

"Oh! oh!"

"They
are trying to find out whether it goes round in a circle, or makes some
progress," continued Blondet. "They were very hard put to it between
the straight line and the curve; the triangle, warranted by Scripture,
seemed to them to be nonsense, when, lo! there arose among them some
prophet or other who declared for the spiral."

"Men might meet
to invent more dangerous nonsense than that!" exclaimed Lucien, making
a faint attempt to champion the brotherhood.

"You take theories
of that sort for idle words," said Felicien Vernou; "but a time comes
when the arguments take the form of gunshot and the guillotine."

"They
have not come to that yet," said Bixiou; "they have only come as far as
the designs of Providence in the invention of champagne, the
humanitarian significance of breeches, and the blind deity who keeps
the world going. They pick up fallen great men like Vico, Saint-Simon,
and Fourier. I am much afraid that they will turn poor Joseph Bridau's
head among them."

"Bianchon, my old schoolfellow, gives me the cold shoulder now," said
Lousteau; "it is all their doing----"

Every
one, thereupon, began to explain his character for the benefit of his
neighbor; and when a clever man feels a pressing need of explaining
himself, and of unlocking his heart, it is pretty clear that wine has
got the upper hand. An hour later, all the men in the company were the
best friends in the world, addressing each other as great men and bold
spirits, who held the future in their hands. Lucien, in his quality of
host, was sufficiently clearheaded to apprehend the meaning of the
sophistries which impressed him and completed his demoralization.

"The
Liberal party," announced Finot, "is compelled to stir up discussion
somehow. There is no fault to find with the action of the Government,
and you may imagine what a fix the Opposition is in. Which of you now
cares to write a pamphlet in favor of the system of primogeniture, and
raise a cry against the secret designs of the Court? The pamphlet will
be paid for handsomely."

"I will write it," said Hector Merlin. "It is my own point of view."

"Your
party will complain that you are compromising them," said Finot.
"Felicien, you must undertake it; Dauriat will bring it out, and we
will keep the secret."

"How much shall I get?"

"Six hundred francs. Sign it 'Le Comte C, three stars.'"

"It's a bargain," said Felicien Vernou.

"So you are introducing the _canard_ to the political world," remarked
Lousteau.

"It
is simply the Chabot affair carried into the region of abstract ideas,"
said Finot. "Fasten intentions on the Government, and then let loose
public opinion."

"How a Government can leave the control of
ideas to such a pack of scamps as we are, is matter for perpetual and
profound astonishment to me," said Claude Vignon.

"If the
Ministry blunders so far as to come down into the arena, we can give
them a drubbing. If they are nettled by it, the thing will rankle in
people's minds, and the Government will lose its hold on the masses.
The newspaper risks nothing, and the authorities have everything to
lose."

"France will be a cipher until newspapers are abolished
by law," said Claude Vignon. "You are making progress hourly," he
added, addressing Finot. "You are a modern order of Jesuits, lacking
the creed, the fixed idea, the discipline, and the union."

They went back to the card-tables; and before long the light of the
candles grew feeble in the dawn.

"Lucien, your friends from the Rue des Quatre-Vents looked as dismal as
criminals going to be hanged," said Coralie.

"They were the judges, not the criminals," replied the poet.

"Judges are more amusing than _that_," said Coralie.

For
a month Lucien's whole time was taken up with supper parties, dinner
engagements, breakfasts, and evening parties; he was swept away by an
irresistible current into a vortex of dissipation and easy work. He no
longer thought of the future. The power of calculation amid the
complications of life is the sign of a strong will which poets,
weaklings, and men who live a purely intellectual life can never
counterfeit. Lucien was living from hand to mouth, spending his money
as fast as he made it, like many another journalist; nor did he give so
much as a thought to those periodically recurrent days of reckoning
which chequer the life of the bohemian in Paris so sadly.

In
dress and figure he was a rival for the great dandies of the day.
Coralie, like all zealots, loved to adorn her idol. She ruined herself
to give her beloved poet the accoutrements which had so stirred his
envy in the Garden of the Tuileries. Lucien had wonderful canes, and a
charming eyeglass; he had diamond studs, and scarf-rings, and
signet-rings, besides an assortment of waistcoats marvelous to behold,
and in sufficient number to match every color in a variety of costumes.
His transition to the estate of dandy swiftly followed. When he went to
the German Minister's dinner, all the young men regarded him with
suppressed envy; yet de Marsay, Vandenesse, Ajuda-Pinto, Maxime de
Trailles, Rastignac, Beaudenord, Manerville, and the Duc de
Maufrigneuse gave place to none in the kingdom of fashion. Men of
fashion are as jealous among themselves as women, and in the same way.
Lucien was placed between Mme. de Montcornet and Mme. d'Espard, in
whose honor the dinner was given; both ladies overwhelmed him with
flatteries.

"Why did you turn your back on society when you
would have been so well received?" asked the Marquise. "Every one was
prepared to make much of you. And I have a quarrel with you too. You
owed me a call--I am still waiting to receive it. I saw you at the
Opera the other day, and you would not deign to come to see me nor to
take any notice of me."

"Your cousin, madame, so unmistakably dismissed me--"

"Oh!
you do not know women," the Marquise d'Espard broke in upon him. "You
have wounded the most angelic heart, the noblest nature that I know.
You do not know all that Louise was trying to do for you, nor how
tactfully she laid her plans for you.--Oh! and she would have
succeeded," the Marquise continued, replying to Lucien's mute
incredulity. "Her husband is dead now; died, as he was bound to die, of
an indigestion; could you doubt that she would be free sooner or later?
And can you suppose that she would like to be Madame Chardon? It was
worth while to take some trouble to gain the title of Comtesse de
Rubempre. Love, you see, is a great vanity, which requires the lesser
vanities to be in harmony with itself--especially in marriage. I might
love you to madness--which is to say, sufficiently to marry you--and
yet I should find it very unpleasant to be called Madame Chardon. You
can see that. And now that you understand the difficulties of Paris
life, you will know how many roundabout ways you must take to reach
your end; very well, then, you must admit that Louise was aspiring to
an all but impossible piece of Court favor; she was quite unknown, she
is not rich, and therefore she could not afford to neglect any means of
success.

"You are clever," the Marquise d'Espard continued; "but
we women, when we love, are cleverer than the cleverest man. My cousin
tried to make that absurd Chatelet useful--Oh!" she broke off, "I owe
not a little amusement to you; your articles on Chatelet made me laugh
heartily."

Lucien knew not what to think of all this. Of the
treachery and bad faith of journalism he had had some experience; but
in spite of his perspicacity, he scarcely expected to find bad faith or
treachery in society. There were some sharp lessons in store for him.

"But, madame," he objected, for her words aroused a lively curiosity,
"is not the Heron under your protection?"

"One
is obliged to be civil to one's worst enemies in society," protested
she; "one may be bored, but one must look as if the talk was amusing,
and not seldom one seems to sacrifice friends the better to serve them.
Are you still a novice? You mean to write, and yet you know nothing of
current deceit? My cousin apparently sacrificed you to the Heron, but
how could she dispense with his influence for you? Our friend stands
well with the present ministry; and we have made him see that your
attacks will do him service--up to a certain point, for we want you to
make it up again some of these days. Chatelet has received
compensations for his troubles; for, as des Lupeaulx said, 'While the
newspapers are making Chatelet ridiculous, they will leave the Ministry
in peace.'"

There was a pause; the Marquise left Lucien to his own reflections.

"M.
Blondet led me to hope that I should have the pleasure of seeing you in
my house," said the Comtesse de Montcornet. "You will meet a few
artists and men of letters, and some one else who has the keenest
desire to become acquainted with you--Mlle. des Touches, the owner of
talents rare among our sex. You will go to her house, no doubt. Mlle.
de Touches (or Camille Maupin, if you prefer it) is prodigiously rich,
and presides over one of the most remarkable salons in Paris. She has
heard that you are as handsome as you are clever, and is dying to meet
you."

Lucien could only pour out incoherent thanks and glance
enviously at Emile Blondet. There was as great a difference between a
great lady like Mme. de Montcornet and Coralie as between Coralie and a
girl out of the streets. The Countess was young and witty and
beautiful, with the very white fairness of women of the north. Her
mother was the Princess Scherbellof, and the Minister before dinner had
paid her the most respectful attention.

By this time the Marquise had made an end of trifling disdainfully with
the wing of a chicken.

"My
poor Louise felt so much affection for you," she said. "She took me
into her confidence; I knew her dreams of a great career for you. She
would have borne a great deal, but what scorn you showed her when you
sent back her letters! Cruelty we can forgive; those who hurt us must
have still some faith in us; but indifference! Indifference is like
polar snows, it extinguishes all life. So, you must see that you have
lost a precious affection through your own fault. Why break with her?
Even if she had scorned you, you had your way to make, had you
not?--your name to win back? Louise thought of all that."

"Then why was she silent?"

"_Eh!
mon Dieu!_" cried the Marquise, "it was I myself who advised her not to
take you into her confidence. Between ourselves, you know, you seemed
so little used to the ways of the world, that I took alarm. I was
afraid that your inexperience and rash ardor might wreck our
carefully-made schemes. Can you recollect yourself as you were then?
You must admit that if you could see your double to-day, you would say
the same yourself. You are not like the same man. That was our mistake.
But would one man in a thousand combine such intellectual gifts with
such wonderful aptitude for taking the tone of society? I did not think
that you would be such an astonishing exception. You were transformed
so quickly, you acquired the manner of Paris so easily, that I did not
recognize you in the Bois de Boulogne a month ago."

Lucien heard
the great lady with inexpressible pleasure; the flatteries were spoken
with such a petulant, childlike, confiding air, and she seemed to take
such a deep interest in him, that he thought of his first evening at
the Panorama-Dramatique, and began to fancy that some such miracle was
about to take place a second time. Everything had smiled upon him since
that happy evening; his youth, he thought, was the talisman that worked
this change. He would prove this great lady; she should not take him
unawares.

"Then, what were these schemes which have turned to chimeras, madame?"
asked he.

"Louise
meant to obtain a royal patent permitting you to bear the name and
title of Rubempre. She wished to put Chardon out of sight. Your
opinions have put that out of the question now, but _then_ it would not
have been so hard to manage, and a title would mean a fortune for you.

"You
will look on these things as trifles and visionary ideas," she
continued; "but we know something of life, and we know, too, all the
solid advantages of a Count's title when it is borne by a fashionable
and extremely charming young man. Announce 'M. Chardon' and 'M. le
Comte de Rubempre' before heiresses or English girls with a million to
their fortune, and note the difference of the effect. The Count might
be in debt, but he would find open hearts; his good looks, brought into
relief by his title, would be like a diamond in a rich setting; M.
Chardon would not be so much as noticed. WE have not invented these
notions; they are everywhere in the world, even among the burgeois. You
are turning your back on fortune at this minute. Do you see that
good-looking young man? He is the Vicomte Felix de Vandenesse, one of
the King's private secretaries. The King is fond enough of young men of
talent, and Vandenesse came from the provinces with baggage nearly as
light as yours. You are a thousand times cleverer than he; but do you
belong to a great family, have you a name? You know des Lupeaulx; his
name is very much like yours, for he was born a Chardin; well, he would
not sell his little farm of Lupeaulx for a million, he will be Comte
des Lupeaulx some day, and perhaps his grandson may be a duke. --You
have made a false start; and if you continue in that way, it will be
all over with you. See how much wiser M. Emile Blondet has been! He is
engaged on a Government newspaper; he is well looked on by those in
authority; he can afford to mix with Liberals, for he holds sound
opinions; and soon or later he will succeed. But then he understood how
to choose his opinions and his protectors.

"Your charming
neighbor" (Mme. d'Espard glanced at Mme. de Montcornet) "was a
Troisville; there are two peers of France in the family and two
deputies. She made a wealthy marriage with her name; she sees a great
deal of society at her house; she has influence, she will move the
political world for young M. Blondet. Where will a Coralie take you? In
a few years' time you will be hopelessly in debt and weary of pleasure.
You have chosen badly in love, and you are arranging your life ill. The
woman whom you delight to wound was at the Opera the other night, and
this was how she spoke of you. She deplored the way in which you were
throwing away your talent and the prime of youth; she was thinking of
you, and not of herself, all the while."

"Ah! if you were only telling me the truth, madame!" cried Lucien.

"What
object should I have in telling lies?" returned the Marquise, with a
glance of cold disdain which annihilated him. He was so dashed by it,
that the conversation dropped, for the Marquise was offended, and said
no more.

Lucien was nettled by her silence, but he felt that it
was due to his own clumsiness, and promised himself that he would
repair his error. He turned to Mme. de Montcornet and talked to her of
Blondet, extolling that young writer for her benefit. The Countess was
gracious to him, and asked him (at a sign from Mme. d'Espard) to spend
an evening at her house. It was to be a small and quiet gathering to
which only friends were invited--Mme. de Bargeton would be there in
spite of her mourning; Lucien would be pleased, she was sure, to meet
Mme. de Bargeton.

"Mme. la Marquise says that all the wrong is
on my side," said Lucien; "so surely it rests with her cousin, does it
not, to decide whether she will meet me?"

"Put an end to those
ridiculous attacks, which only couple her name with the name of a man
for whom she does not care at all, and you will soon sign a treaty of
peace. You thought that she had used you ill, I am told, but I myself
have seen her in sadness because you had forsaken her. Is it true that
she left the provinces on your account?"

Lucien smiled; he did not venture to make any other reply.

"Oh!
how could you doubt the woman who made such sacrifices for you?
Beautiful and intellectual as she is, she deserves besides to be loved
for her own sake; and Mme. de Bargeton cared less for you than for your
talents. Believe me, women value intellect more than good looks," added
the Countess, stealing a glance at Emile Blondet.

In the
Minister's hotel Lucien could see the differences between the great
world and that other world beyond the pale in which he had lately been
living. There was no sort of resemblance between the two kinds of
splendor, no single point in common. The loftiness and disposition of
the rooms in one of the handsomest houses in the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, the ancient gilding, the breadth of decorative style,
the subdued richness of the accessories, all this was strange and new
to him; but Lucien had learned very quickly to take luxury for granted,
and he showed no surprise. His behavior was as far removed from
assurance or fatuity on the one hand as from complacency and servility
upon the other. His manner was good; he found favor in the eyes of all
who were not prepared to be hostile, like the younger men, who resented
his sudden intrusion into the great world, and felt jealous of his good
looks and his success.

When they rose from table, he offered his
arm to Mme. d'Espard, and was not refused. Rastignac, watching him, saw
that the Marquise was gracious to Lucien, and came in the character of
a fellow-countryman to remind the poet that they had met once before at
Mme. du Val-Noble's. The young patrician seemed anxious to find an ally
in the great man from his own province, asked Lucien to breakfast with
him some morning, and offered to introduce him to some young men of
fashion. Lucien was nothing loath.

"The dear Blondet is coming," said Rastignac.

The
two were standing near the Marquis de Ronquerolles, the Duc de Rhetore,
de Marsay, and General Montriveau. The Minister came across to join the
group.

"Well," said he, addressing Lucien with a bluff German
heartiness that concealed his dangerous subtlety; "well, so you have
made your peace with Mme. d'Espard; she is delighted with you, and we
all know," he added, looking round the group, "how difficult it is to
please her."

"Yes, but she adores intellect," said Rastignac, "and my illustrious
fellow-countryman has wit enough to sell."

"He
will soon find out that he is not doing well for himself," Blondet put
in briskly. "He will come over; he will soon be one of us."

Those
who stood about Lucien rang the changes on this theme; the older and
responsible men laid down the law with one or two profound remarks; the
younger ones made merry at the expense of the Liberals.

"He simply tossed up head or tails for Right or Left, I am sure,"
remarked Blondet, "but now he will choose for himself."

Lucien burst out laughing; he thought of his talk with Lousteau that
evening in the Luxembourg Gardens.

"He
has taken on a bear-leader," continued Blondet, "one Etienne Lousteau,
a newspaper hack who sees a five-franc piece in a column. Lousteau's
politics consist in a belief that Napoleon will return, and (and this
seems to me to be still more simple) in a confidence in the gratitude
and patriotism of their worships the gentlemen of the Left. As a
Rubempre, Lucien's sympathies should lean towards the aristocracy; as a
journalist, he ought to be for authority, or he will never be either
Rubempre or a secretary-general."

The Minister now asked Lucien
to take a hand at whist; but, to the great astonishment of those
present, he declared that he did not know the game.

"Come early
to me on the day of that breakfast affair," Rastignac whispered, "and I
will teach you to play. You are a discredit to the royal city of
Angouleme; and, to repeat M. de Talleyrand's saying, you are laying up
an unhappy old age for yourself."

Des Lupeaulx was announced. He
remembered Lucien, whom he had met at Mme. du Val-Noble's, and bowed
with a semblance of friendliness which the poet could not doubt. Des
Lupeaulx was in favor, he was a Master of Requests, and did the
Ministry secret services; he was, moreover, cunning and ambitious,
slipping himself in everywhere; he was everybody's friend, for he never
knew whom he might need. He saw plainly that this was a young
journalist whose social success would probably equal his success in
literature; saw, too, that the poet was ambitious, and overwhelmed him
with protestations and expressions of friendship and interest, till
Lucien felt as if they were old friends already, and took his promises
and speeches for more than their worth. Des Lupeaulx made a point of
knowing a man thoroughly well if he wanted to get rid of him or feared
him as a rival. So, to all appearance, Lucien was well received. He
knew that much of his success was owing to the Duc de Rhetore, the
Minister, Mme. d'Espard, and Mme. de Montcornet, and went to spend a
few moments with the two ladies before taking leave, and talked his
very best for them.

"What a coxcomb!" said des Lupeaulx, turning to the Marquise when he
had gone.

"He
will be rotten before he is ripe," de Marsay added, smiling. "You must
have private reasons of your own, madame, for turning his head in this
way."

When Lucien stepped into the carriage in the
courtyard, he found Coralie waiting for him. She had come to fetch him.
The little attention touched him; he told her the history of his
evening; and, to his no small astonishment, the new notions which even
now were running in his head met with Coralie's approval. She strongly
advised him to enlist under the ministerial banner.

"You have
nothing to expect from the Liberals but hard knocks," she said. "They
plot and conspire; they murdered the Duc de Berri. Will they upset the
Government? Never! You will never come to anything through them, while
you will be Comte de Rubempre if you throw in your lot with the other
side. You might render services to the State, and be a peer of France,
and marry an heiress. Be an Ultra. It is the proper thing besides," she
added, this being the last word with her on all subjects. "I dined with
the Val-Noble; she told me that Theodore Gaillard is really going to
start his little Royalist _Revue_, so as to reply to your witticisms
and the jokes in the _Miroir_. To hear them talk, M. Villele's party
will be in office before the year is out. Try to turn the change to
account before they come to power; and say nothing to Etienne and your
friends, for they are quite equal to playing you some ill turn."

A
week later, Lucien went to Mme. de Montcornet's house, and saw the
woman whom he had so loved, whom later he had stabbed to the heart with
a jest. He felt the most violent agitation at the sight of her, for
Louise also had undergone a transformation. She was the Louise that she
would always have been but for her detention in the provinces --she was
a great lady. There was a grace and refinement in her mourning dress
which told that she was a happy widow; Lucien fancied that this
coquetry was aimed in some degree at him, and he was right; but, like
an ogre, he had tasted flesh, and all that evening he vacillated
between Coralie's warm, voluptuous beauty and the dried-up, haughty,
cruel Louise. He could not make up his mind to sacrifice the actress to
the great lady; and Mme. de Bargeton--all the old feeling reviving in
her at the sight of Lucien, Lucien's beauty, Lucien's cleverness--was
waiting and expecting that sacrifice all evening; and after all her
insinuating speeches and her fascinations, she had her trouble for her
pains. She left the room with a fixed determination to be revenged.

"Well,
dear Lucien," she had said, and in her kindness there was both
generosity and Parisian grace; "well, dear Lucien, so you, that were to
have been my pride, took me for your first victim; and I forgave you,
my dear, for I felt that in such a revenge there was a trace of love
still left."

With that speech, and the queenly way in which it
was uttered, Mme. de Bargeton recovered her position. Lucien, convinced
that he was a thousand times in the right, felt that he had been put in
the wrong. Not one word of the causes of the rupture! not one syllable
of the terrible farewell letter! A woman of the world has a wonderful
genius for diminishing her faults by laughing at them; she can
obliterate them all with a smile or a question of feigned surprise, and
she knows this. She remembers nothing, she can explain everything; she
is amazed, asks questions, comments, amplifies, and quarrels with you,
till in the end her sins disappear like stains on the application of a
little soap and water; black as ink you knew them to be; and lo! in a
moment, you behold immaculate white innocence, and lucky are you if you
do not find that you yourself have sinned in some way beyond redemption.

In
a moment old illusions regained their power over Lucien and Louise;
they talked like friends, as before; but when the lady, with a
hesitating sigh, put the question, "Are you happy?" Lucien was not
ready with a prompt, decided answer; he was intoxicated with gratified
vanity; Coralie, who (let us admit it) had made life easy for him, had
turned his head. A melancholy "No" would have made his fortune, but he
must needs begin to explain his position with regard to Coralie. He
said that he was loved for his own sake; he said a good many foolish
things that a man will say when he is smitten with a tender passion,
and thought the while that he was doing a clever thing.

Mme. de
Bargeton bit her lips. There was no more to be said. Mme. d'Espard
brought Mme. de Montcornet to her cousin, and Lucien became the hero of
the evening, so to speak. He was flattered, petted, and made much of by
the three women; he was entangled with art which no words can describe.
His social success in this fine and brilliant circle was at least as
great as his triumphs in journalism. Beautiful Mlle. des Touches, so
well known as "Camille Maupin," asked him to one of her Wednesday
dinners; his beauty, now so justly famous, seemed to have made an
impression upon her. Lucien exerted himself to show that his wit
equaled his good looks, and Mlle. des Touches expressed her admiration
with a playful outspokenness and a pretty fervor of friendship which
deceives those who do not know life in Paris to its depths, nor suspect
how continual enjoyment whets the appetite for novelty.

"If she should like me as much as I like her, we might abridge the
romance," said Lucien, addressing de Marsay and Rastignac.

"You
both of you write romances too well to care to live them," returned
Rastignac. "Can men and women who write ever fall in love with each
other? A time is sure to come when they begin to make little cutting
remarks."

"It would not be a bad dream for you," laughed de
Marsay. "The charming young lady is thirty years old, it is true, but
she has an income of eighty thousand livres. She is adorably
capricious, and her style of beauty wears well. Coralie is a silly
little fool, my dear boy, well enough for a start, for a young spark
must have a mistress; but unless you make some great conquest in the
great world, an actress will do you harm in the long run. Now, my boy,
go and cut out Conti. Here he is, just about to sing with Camille
Maupin. Poetry has taken precedence of music ever since time began."

"Conti
sings too well," he told des Lupeaulx; and he went back to Mme. de
Bargeton, who carried him off to Mme. d'Espard in another room.

"Well, will you not interest yourself in him?" asked Mme. de Bargeton.

The
Marquise spoke with an air half kindly, half insolent. "Let M. Chardon
first put himself in such a position that he will not compromise those
who take an interest in him," she said. "If he wishes to drop his
patronymic and to bear his mother's name, he should at any rate be on
the right side, should he not?"

"In less than two months I will arrange everything," said Lucien.

"Very
well," returned Mme. d'Espard. "I will speak to my father and uncle;
they are in waiting, they will speak to the Chancellor for you."

The
diplomatist and the two women had very soon discovered Lucien's weak
side. The poet's head was turned by the glory of the aristocracy; every
man who entered the rooms bore a sounding name mounted in a glittering
title, and he himself was plain Chardon. Unspeakable mortification
filled him at the sound of it. Wherever he had been during the last few
days, that pang had been constantly present with him. He felt,
moreover, a sensation quite as unpleasant when he went back to his desk
after an evening spent in the great world, in which he made a tolerable
figure, thanks to Coralie's carriage and Coralie's servants.

He
learned to ride, in order to escort Mme. d'Espard, Mlle. des Touches,
and the Comtesse de Montcornet when they drove in the Bois, a privilege
which he had envied other young men so greatly when he first came to
Paris. Finot was delighted to give his right-hand man an order for the
Opera, so Lucien wasted many an evening there, and thenceforward he was
among the exquisites of the day.

The poet asked Rastignac and
his new associates to a breakfast, and made the blunder of giving it in
Coralie's rooms in the Rue de Vendome; he was too young, too much of a
poet, too self-confident, to discern certain shades and distinctions in
conduct; and how should an actress, a good-hearted but uneducated girl,
teach him life? His guests were anything but charitably disposed
towards him; it was clearly proven to their minds that Lucien the
critic and the actress were in collusion for their mutual interests,
and all of the young men were jealous of an arrangement which all of
them stigmatized. The most pitiless of those who laughed that evening
at Lucien's expense was Rastignac himself. Rastignac had made and held
his position by very similar means; but so careful had he been of
appearances, that he could afford to treat scandal as slander.

Lucien
proved an apt pupil at whist. Play became a passion with him; and so
far from disapproving, Coralie encouraged his extravagance with the
peculiar short-sightedness of an all-absorbing love, which sees nothing
beyond the moment, and is ready to sacrifice anything, even the future,
to the present enjoyment. Coralie looked on cards as a safe-guard
against rivals. A great love has much in common with childhood--a
child's heedless, careless, spendthrift ways, a child's laughter and
tears.

In those days there lived and flourished a set of young
men, some of them rich, some poor, and all of them idle, called
"free-livers" (_viveurs_); and, indeed, they lived with incredible
insolence --unabashed and unproductive consumers, and yet more intrepid
drinkers. These spendthrifts mingled the roughest practical jokes with
a life not so much reckless as suicidal; they drew back from no
impossibility, and gloried in pranks which, nevertheless, were confined
within certain limits; and as they showed the most original wit in
their escapades, it was impossible not to pardon them.

No sign
of the times more plainly discovered the helotism to which the
Restoration had condemned the young manhood of the epoch. The younger
men, being at a loss to know what to do with themselves, were compelled
to find other outlets for their superabundant energy besides
journalism, or conspiracy, or art, or letters. They squandered their
strength in the wildest excesses, such sap and luxuriant power was
there in young France. The hard workers among these gilded youths
wanted power and pleasure; the artists wished for money; the idle
sought to stimulate their appetites or wished for excitement; one and
all of them wanted a place, and one and all were shut out from politics
and public life. Nearly all the "free-livers" were men of unusual
mental powers; some held out against the enervating life, others were
ruined by it. The most celebrated and the cleverest among them was
Eugene Rastignac, who entered, with de Marsay's help, upon a political
career, in which he has since distinguished himself. The practical
jokes, in which the set indulged became so famous, that not a few
vaudevilles have been founded upon them.

Blondet introduced
Lucien to this society of prodigals, of which he became a brilliant
ornament, ranking next to Bixiou, one of the most mischievous and
untiring scoffing wits of his time. All through that winter Lucien's
life was one long fit of intoxication, with intervals of easy work. He
continued his series of sketches of contemporary life, and very
occasionally made great efforts to write a few pages of serious
criticism, on which he brought his utmost power of thought to bear. But
study was the exception, not the rule, and only undertaken at the
bidding of necessity; dinners and breakfasts, parties of pleasure and
play, took up most of his time, and Coralie absorbed all that was left.
He would not think of the morrow. He saw besides that his so-called
friends were leading the same life, earning money easily by writing
publishers' prospectuses and articles paid for by speculators; all of
them lived beyond their incomes, none of them thought seriously of the
future.

Lucien had been admitted into the ranks of journalism
and of literature on terms of equality; he foresaw immense difficulties
in the way if he should try to rise above the rest. Every one was
willing to look upon him as an equal; no one would have him for a
superior. Unconsciously he gave up the idea of winning fame in
literature, for it seemed easier to gain success in politics.

"Intrigue
raises less opposition than talent," du Chatelet had said one day (for
Lucien and the Baron had made up their quarrel); "a plot below the
surface rouses no one's attention. Intrigue, moreover, is superior to
talent, for it makes something out of nothing; while, for the most
part, the immense resources of talent only injure a man."

So
Lucien never lost sight of his principal idea; and though to-morrow,
following close upon the heels of to-day in the midst of an orgy, never
found the promised work accomplished, Lucien was assiduous in society.
He paid court to Mme. de Bargeton, the Marquise d'Espard, and the
Comtesse de Montcornet; he never missed a single party given by Mlle.
des Touches, appearing in society after a dinner given by authors or
publishers, and leaving the salons for a supper given in consequence of
a bet. The demands of conversation and the excitement of play absorbed
all the ideas and energy left by excess. The poet had lost the lucidity
of judgment and coolness of head which must be preserved if a man is to
see all that is going on around him, and never to lose the exquisite
tact which the _parvenu_ needs at every moment. How should he know how
many a time Mme. de Bargeton left him with wounded susceptibilities,
how often she forgave him or added one more condemnation to the rest?

Chatelet
saw that his rival had still a chance left, so he became Lucien's
friend. He encouraged the poet in dissipation that wasted his energies.
Rastignac, jealous of his fellow-countryman, and thinking, besides,
that Chatelet would be a surer and more useful ally than Lucien, had
taken up the Baron's cause. So, some few days after the meeting of the
Petrarch and Laura of Angouleme, Rastignac brought about the
reconciliation between the poet and the elderly beau at a sumptuous
supper given at the _Rocher de Cancale_. Lucien never returned home
till morning, and rose in the middle of the day; Coralie was always at
his side, he could not forego a single pleasure. Sometimes he saw his
real position, and made good resolutions, but they came to nothing in
his idle, easy life; and the mainspring of will grew slack, and only
responded to the heaviest pressure of necessity.

Coralie had
been glad that Lucien should amuse himself; she had encouraged him in
this reckless expenditure, because she thought that the cravings which
she fostered would bind her lover to her. But tender-hearted and loving
as she was, she found courage to advise Lucien not to forget his work,
and once or twice was obliged to remind him that he had earned very
little during the month. Their debts were growing frightfully fast. The
fifteen hundred francs which remained from the purchase-money of the
_Marguerites_ had been swallowed up at once, together with Lucien's
first five hundred livres. In three months he had only made a thousand
francs, yet he felt as though he had been working tremendously hard.
But by this time Lucien had adopted the "free-livers" pleasant theory
of debts.

Debts are becoming to a young man, but after the age
of five-and-twenty they are inexcusable. It should be observed that
there are certain natures in which a really poetic temper is united
with a weakened will; and these while absorbed in feeling, that they
may transmute personal experience, sensation, or impression into some
permanent form are essentially deficient in the moral sense which
should accompany all observation. Poets prefer rather to receive their
own impressions than to enter into the souls of others to study the
mechanism of their feelings and thoughts. So Lucien neither asked his
associates what became of those who disappeared from among them, nor
looked into the futures of his so-called friends. Some of them were
heirs to property, others had definite expectations; yet others either
possessed names that were known in the world, or a most robust belief
in their destiny and a fixed resolution to circumvent the law. Lucien,
too, believed in his future on the strength of various profound
axiomatic sayings of Blondet's: "Everything comes out all right at
last--If a man has nothing, his affairs cannot be embarrassed--We have
nothing to lose but the fortune that we seek--Swim with the stream; it
will take you somewhere--A clever man with a footing in society can
make a fortune whenever he pleases."

That winter, filled as it
was with so many pleasures and dissipations, was a necessary interval
employed in finding capital for the new Royalist paper; Theodore
Gaillard and Hector Merlin only brought out the first number of the
_Reveil_ in March 1822. The affair had been settled at Mme. du
Val-Noble's house. Mme. du val-Noble exercised a certain influence over
the great personages, Royalist writers, and bankers who met in her
splendid rooms--"fit for a tale out of the _Arabian Nights_," as the
elegant and clever courtesan herself used to say--to transact business
which could not be arranged elsewhere. The editorship had been promised
to Hector Merlin. Lucien, Merlin's intimate, was pretty certain to be
his right-hand man, and a _feuilleton_ in a Ministerial paper had been
promised to him besides. All through the dissipations of that winter
Lucien had been secretly making ready for this change of front. Child
as he was, he fancied that he was a deep politician because he
concealed the preparation for the approaching transformation-scene,
while he was counting upon Ministerial largesses to extricate himself
from embarrassment and to lighten Coralie's secret cares. Coralie said
nothing of her distress; she smiled now, as always; but Berenice was
bolder, she kept Lucien informed of their difficulties; and the budding
great man, moved, after the fashion of poets, by the tale of disasters,
would vow that he would begin to work in earnest, and then forget his
resolution, and drown his fleeting cares in excess. One day Coralie saw
the poetic brow overcast, and scolded Berenice, and told her lover that
everything would be settled.

Mme. d'Espard and Mme. de Bargeton
were waiting for Lucien's profession of his new creed, so they said,
before applying through Chatelet for the patent which should permit
Lucien to bear the so-much desired name. Lucien had proposed to
dedicate the _Marguerites_ to Mme. d'Espard, and the Marquise seemed to
be not a little flattered by a compliment which authors have been
somewhat chary of paying since they became a power in the land; but
when Lucien went to Dauriat and asked after his book, that worthy
publisher met him with excellent reasons for the delay in its
appearance. Dauriat had this and that in hand, which took up all his
time; a new volume by Canalis was coming out, and he did not want the
two books to clash; M. de Lamartine's second series of _Meditations_
was in the press, and two important collections of poetry ought not to
appear together.

By this time, however, Lucien's needs were so
pressing that he had recourse to Finot, and received an advance on his
work. When, at a supper-party that evening, the poet journalist
explained his position to his friends in the fast set, they drowned his
scruples in champagne, iced with pleasantries. Debts! There was never
yet a man of any power without debts! Debts represented satisfied
cravings, clamorous vices. A man only succeeds under the pressure of
the iron hand of necessity. Debts forsooth!

"Why, the one pledge of which a great man can be sure, is given him by
his friend the pawnbroker," cried Blondet.

"If you want everything, you must owe for everything," called Bixiou.

"No," corrected des Lupeaulx, "if you owe for everything, you have had
everything."

The
party contrived to convince the novice that his debts were a golden
spur to urge on the horses of the chariot of his fortunes. There is
always the stock example of Julius Caesar with his debt of forty
millions, and Friedrich II. on an allowance of one ducat a month, and a
host of other great men whose failings are held up for the corruption
of youth, while not a word is said of their wide-reaching ideas, their
courage equal to all odds.

Creditors seized Coralie's horses,
carriage, and furniture at last, for an amount of four thousand francs.
Lucien went to Lousteau and asked his friend to meet his bill for the
thousand francs lent to pay gaming debts; but Lousteau showed him
certain pieces of stamped paper, which proved that Florine was in much
the same case. Lousteau was grateful, however, and offered to take the
necessary steps for the sale of Lucien's _Archer of Charles IX._

"How came Florine to be in this plight?" asked Lucien.

"The
Matifat took alarm," said Lousteau. "We have lost him; but if Florine
chooses, she can make him pay dear for his treachery. I will tell you
all about it."

Three days after this bootless errand, Lucien and
Coralie were breakfasting in melancholy spirits beside the fire in
their pretty bedroom. Berenice had cooked a dish of eggs for them over
the grate; for the cook had gone, and the coachman and servants had
taken leave. They could not sell the furniture, for it had been
attached; there was not a single object of any value in the house. A
goodly collection of pawntickets, forming a very instructive octavo
volume, represented all the gold, silver, and jewelry. Berenice had
kept back a couple of spoons and forks, that was all.

Lousteau's
newspaper was of service now to Coralie and Lucien, little as they
suspected it; for the tailor, dressmaker, and milliner were afraid to
meddle with a journalist who was quite capable of writing down their
establishments.

Etienne Lousteau broke in upon their breakfast
with a shout of "Hurrah! Long live _The Archer of Charles IX._! And I
have converted a hundred francs worth of books into cash, children. We
will go halves."

He handed fifty francs to Coralie, and sent Berenice out in quest of a
more substantial breakfast.

"Hector
Merlin and I went to a booksellers' trade dinner yesterday, and
prepared the way for your romance with cunning insinuations. Dauriat is
in treaty, but Dauriat is haggling over it; he won't give more than
four thousand francs for two thousand copies, and you want six thousand
francs. We made you out twice as great as Sir Walter Scott! Oh! you
have such novels as never were in the inwards of you. It is not a mere
book for sale, it is a big business; you are not simply the writer of
one more or less ingenious novel, you are going to write a whole
series. The word 'series' did it! So, mind you, don't forget that you
have a great historical series on hand--_La Grande Mademoiselle_, or
_The France of Louis Quatorze_; _Cotillon I._, or _The Early Days of
Louis Quinze_; _The Queen and the Cardinal_, or _Paris and the Fronde_;
_The Son of the Concini_, or _Richelieu's Intrigue_. These novels will
be announced on the wrapper of the book. We call this manoeuvre 'giving
a success a toss in the coverlet,' for the titles are all to appear on
the cover, till you will be better known for the books that you have
not written than for the work you have done. And 'In the Press' is a
way of gaining credit in advance for work that you will do. Come, now,
let us have a little fun! Here comes the champagne. You can understand,
Lucien, that our men opened eyes as big as saucers. By the by, I see
that you have saucers still left."

"They are attached," explained Coralie.

"I
understand, and I resume. Show a publisher one manuscript volume and he
will believe in all the rest. A publisher asks to see your manuscript,
and gives you to understand that he is going to read it. Why disturb
his harmless vanity? They never read a manuscript; they would not
publish so many if they did. Well, Hector and I allowed it to leak out
that you might consider an offer of five thousand francs for three
thousand copies, in two editions. Let me have your _Archer_; the day
after to-morrow we are to breakfast with the publishers, and we will
get the upper hand of them."

"Who are they?" asked Lucien.

"Two
partners named Fendant and Cavalier; they are two good fellows, pretty
straightforward in business. One of them used to be with Vidal and
Porchon, the other is the cleverest hand on the Quai des Augustins.
They only started in business last year, and have lost a little on
translations of English novels; so now my gentlemen have a mind to
exploit the native product. There is a rumor current that those dealers
in spoiled white paper are trading on other people's capital; but I
don't think it matters very much to you who finds the money, so long as
you are paid."

Two days later, the pair went to a breakfast in
the Rue Serpente, in Lucien's old quarter of Paris. Lousteau still kept
his room in the Rue de la Harpe; and it was in the same state as
before, but this time Lucien felt no surprise; he had been initiated
into the life of journalism; he knew all its ups and downs. Since that
evening of his introduction to the Wooden Galleries, he had been paid
for many an article, and gambled away the money along with the desire
to write. He had filled columns, not once but many times, in the
ingenious ways described by Lousteau on that memorable evening as they
went to the Palais Royal. He was dependent upon Barbet and Braulard; he
trafficked in books and theatre-tickets; he shrank no longer from any
attack, from writing any panegyric; and at this moment he was in some
sort rejoicing to make all he could out of Lousteau before turning his
back on the Liberals. His intimate knowledge of the party would stand
him in good stead in future. And Lousteau, on his side, was privately
receiving five hundred francs of purchase-money, under the name of
commission, from Fendant and Cavalier for introducing the future Sir
Walter Scott to two enterprising tradesmen in search of a French Author
of "Waverley."

The firm of Fendant and Cavalier had started in
business without any capital whatsoever. A great many publishing houses
were established at that time in the same way, and are likely to be
established so long as papermakers and printers will give credit for
the time required to play some seven or eight of the games of chance
called "new publications." At that time, as at present, the author's
copyright was paid for in bills at six, nine, and twelve months--a
method of payment determined by the custom of the trade, for
booksellers settle accounts between themselves by bills at even longer
dates. Papermakers and printers are paid in the same way, so that in
practice the publisher-bookseller has a dozen or a score of works on
sale for a twelvemonth before he pays for them. Even if only two or
three of these hit the public taste, the profitable speculations pay
for the bad, and the publisher pays his way by grafting, as it were,
one book upon another. But if all of them turn out badly; or if, for
his misfortune, the publisher-bookseller happens to bring out some
really good literature which stays on hand until the right public
discovers and appreciates it; or if it costs too much to discount the
paper that he receives, then, resignedly, he files his schedule, and
becomes a bankrupt with an untroubled mind. He was prepared all along
for something of the kind. So, all the chances being in favor of the
publishers, they staked other people's money, not their own upon the
gaming-table of business speculation.

This was the case with
Fendant and Cavalier. Cavalier brought his experience, Fendant his
industry; the capital was a joint-stock affair, and very accurately
described by that word, for it consisted in a few thousand francs
scraped together with difficulty by the mistresses of the pair. Out of
this fund they allowed each other a fairly handsome salary, and
scrupulously spent it all in dinners to journalists and authors, or at
the theatre, where their business was transacted, as they said. This
questionably honest couple were both supposed to be clever men of
business, but Fendant was more slippery than Cavalier. Cavalier, true
to his name, traveled about, Fendant looked after business in Paris. A
partnership between two publishers is always more or less of a duel,
and so it was with Fendant and Cavalier.

They had brought out
plenty of romances already, such as the _Tour du Nord_, _Le Marchand de
Benares_, _La Fontaine du Sepulcre_, and _Tekeli_, translations of the
works of Galt, an English novelist who never attained much popularity
in France. The success of translations of Scott had called the
attention of the trade to English novels. The race of publishers, all
agog for a second Norman conquest, were seeking industriously for a
second Scott, just as at a rather later day every one must needs look
for asphalt in stony soil, or bitumen in marshes, and speculate in
projected railways. The stupidity of the Paris commercial world is
conspicuous in these attempts to do the same thing twice, for success
lies in contraries; and in Paris, of all places in the world, success
spoils success. So beneath the title of _Strelitz, or Russia a Hundred
Years Ago_, Fendant and Cavalier rashly added in big letters the words,
"In the style of Scott."

Fendant and Cavalier were in great need
of a success. A single good book might float their sunken bales, they
thought; and there was the alluring prospect besides of articles in the
newspapers, the great way of promoting sales in those days. A book is
very seldom bought and sold for its just value, and purchases are
determined by considerations quite other than the merits of the work.
So Fendant and Cavalier thought of Lucien as a journalist, and of his
book as a salable article, which would help them to tide over their
monthly settlement.

The partners occupied the ground floor of
one of the great old-fashioned houses in the Rue Serpente; their
private office had been contrived at the further end of a suite of
large drawing-rooms, now converted into warehouses for books. Lucien
and Etienne found the publishers in their office, the agreement drawn
up, and the bills ready. Lucien wondered at such prompt action.

Fendant
was short and thin, and by no means reassuring of aspect. With his low,
narrow forehead, sunken nose, and hard mouth, he looked like a Kalmuck
Tartar; a pair of small, wide-awake black eyes, the crabbed irregular
outline of his countenance, a voice like a cracked bell--the man's
whole appearance, in fact, combined to give the impression that this
was a consummate rascal. A honeyed tongue compensated for these
disadvantages, and he gained his ends by talk. Cavalier, a stout,
thick-set young fellow, looked more like the driver of a mail coach
than a publisher; he had hair of a sandy color, a fiery red
countenance, and the heavy build and untiring tongue of a commercial
traveler.

"There is no need to discuss this affair," said
Fendant, addressing Lucien and Lousteau. "I have read the work, it is
very literary, and so exactly the kind of thing we want, that I have
sent it off as it is to the printer. The agreement is drawn on the
lines laid down, and besides, we always make the same stipulations in
all cases. The bills fall due in six, nine, and twelve months
respectively; you will meet with no difficulty in discounting them, and
we will refund you the discount. We have reserved the right of giving a
new title to the book. We don't care for _The Archer of Charles IX._;
it doesn't tickle the reader's curiosity sufficiently; there were
several kings of that name, you see, and there were so many archers in
the Middle Ages. If you had only called it the _Soldier of Napoleon_,
now! But _The Archer of Charles IX._!--why, Cavalier would have to give
a course of history lessons before he could place a copy anywhere in
the provinces."

"If you but knew the class of people that we have to do with!"
exclaimed Cavalier.

"_Saint Bartholomew_ would suit better," continued Fendant.

"_Catherine de' Medici, or France under Charles IX._, would sound more
like one of Scott's novels," added Cavalier.

"We will settle it when the work is printed," said Fendant.

"Do as you please, so long as I approve your title," said Lucien.

The
agreement was read over, signed in duplicate, and each of the
contracting parties took their copy. Lucien put the bills in his pocket
with unequaled satisfaction, and the four repaired to Fendant's abode,
where they breakfasted on beefsteaks and oysters, kidneys in champagne,
and Brie cheese; but if the fare was something of the homeliest, the
wines were exquisite; Cavalier had an acquaintance a traveler in the
wine trade. Just as they sat down to table the printer appeared, to
Lucien's surprise, with the first two proof-sheets.

"We want to get on with it," Fendant said; "we are counting on your
book; we want a success confoundedly badly."

The breakfast, begun at noon, lasted till five o'clock.

"Where shall we get cash for these things?" asked Lucien as they came
away, somewhat heated and flushed with the wine.

"We might try Barbet," suggested Etienne, and they turned down to the
Quai des Augustins.

"Coralie
is astonished to the highest degree over Florine's loss. Florine only
told her about it yesterday; she seemed to lay the blame of it on you,
and was so vexed, that she was ready to throw you over."

"That's
true," said Lousteau. Wine had got the better of prudence, and he
unbosomed himself to Lucien, ending up with: "My friend--for you are my
friend, Lucien; you lent me a thousand francs, and you have only once
asked me for the money--shun play! If I had never touched a card, I
should be a happy man. I owe money all round. At this moment I have the
bailiffs at my heels; indeed, when I go to the Palais Royal, I have
dangerous capes to double."

In the language of the fast set,
doubling a cape meant dodging a creditor, or keeping out of his way.
Lucien had not heard the expression before, but he was familiar with
the practice by this time.

"Are your debts so heavy?"

"A
mere trifle," said Lousteau. "A thousand crowns would pull me through.
I have resolved to turn steady and give up play, and I have done a
little 'chantage' to pay my debts."

"What is 'chantage'?" asked Lucien.

"It
is an English invention recently imported. A 'chanteur' is a man who
can manage to put a paragraph in the papers--never an editor nor a
responsible man, for they are not supposed to know anything about it,
and there is always a Giroudeau or a Philippe Bridau to be found. A
bravo of this stamp finds up somebody who has his own reasons for not
wanting to be talked about. Plenty of people have a few peccadilloes,
or some more or less original sin, upon their consciences; there are
plenty of fortunes made in ways that would not bear looking into;
sometimes a man has kept the letter of the law, and sometimes he has
not; and in either case, there is a tidbit of tattle for the inquirer,
as, for instance, that tale of Fouche's police surrounding the spies of
the Prefect of Police, who, not being in the secret of the fabrication
of forged English banknotes, were just about to pounce on the
clandestine printers employed by the Minister, or there is the story of
Prince Galathionne's diamonds, the Maubreuile affair, or the Pombreton
will case. The 'chanteur' gets possession of some compromising letter,
asks for an interview; and if the man that made the money does not buy
silence, the 'chanteur' draws a picture of the press ready to take the
matter up and unravel his private affairs. The rich man is frightened,
he comes down with the money, and the trick succeeds.

"You are
committed to some risky venture, which might easily be written down in
a series of articles; a 'chanteur' waits upon you, and offers to
withdraw the articles--for a consideration. 'Chanteurs' are sent to men
in office, who will bargain that their acts and not their private
characters are to be attacked, or they are heedless of their
characters, and anxious only to shield the woman they love. One of your
acquaintance, that charming Master of Requests des Lupeaulx, is a kind
of agent for affairs of this sort. The rascal has made a position for
himself in the most marvelous way in the very centre of power; he is
the middle-man of the press and the ambassador of the Ministers; he
works upon a man's self-love; he bribes newspapers to pass over a loan
in silence, or to make no comment on a contract which was never put up
for public tender, and the jackals of Liberal bankers get a share out
of it. That was a bit of 'chantage' that you did with Dauriat; he gave
you a thousand crowns to let Nathan alone. In the eighteenth century,
when journalism was still in its infancy, this kind of blackmail was
levied by pamphleteers in the pay of favorites and great lords. The
original inventor was Pietro Aretino, a great Italian. Kings went in
fear of him, as stage-players go in fear of a newspaper to-day."

"What did you do to the Matifat to make the thousand crowns?"

"I
attacked Florine in half a dozen papers. Florine complained to Matifat.
Matifat went to Braulard to find out what the attacks meant. I did my
'chantage' for Finot's benefit, and Finot put Braulard on the wrong
scent; Braulard told the man of drugs that _you_ were demolishing
Florine in Coralie's interest. Then Giroudeau went round to Matifat and
told him (in confidence) that the whole business could be accommodated
if he (Matifat) would consent to sell his sixth share in Finot's review
for ten thousand francs. Finot was to give me a thousand crowns if the
dodge succeeded. Well, Matifat was only too glad to get back ten
thousand francs out of the thirty thousand invested in a risky
speculation, as he thought, for Florine had been telling him for
several days past that Finot's review was doing badly; and, instead of
paying a dividend, something was said of calling up more capital. So
Matifat was just about to close with the offer, when the manager of the
Panorama-Dramatique comes to him with some accommodation bills that he
wanted to negotiate before filing his schedule. To induce Matifat to
take them of him, he let out a word of Finot's trick. Matifat, being a
shrewd man of business, took the hint, held tight to his sixth, and is
laughing in his sleeve at us. Finot and I are howling with despair. We
have been so misguided as to attack a man who has no affection for his
mistress, a heartless, soulless wretch. Unluckily, too, for us,
Matifat's business is not amenable to the jurisdiction of the press,
and he cannot be made to smart for it through his interests. A druggist
is not like a hatter or a milliner, or a theatre or a work of art; he
is above criticism; you can't run down his opium and dyewoods, nor
cocoa beans, paint, and pepper. Florine is at her wits' end; the
Panorama closes to-morrow, and what will become of her she does not
know."

"Coralie's engagement at the Gymnase begins in a few days," said
Lucien; "she might do something for Florine."

"Not
she!" said Lousteau. "Coralie is not clever, but she is not quite
simple enough to help herself to a rival. We are in a mess with a
vengeance. And Finot is in such a hurry to buy back his sixth----"

"Why?"

"It
is a capital bit of business, my dear fellow. There is a chance of
selling the paper for three hundred thousand francs; Finot would have
one-third, and his partners besides are going to pay him a commission,
which he will share with des Lupeaulx. So I propose to do another turn
of 'chantage.'"

"'Chantage' seems to mean your money or your life?"

"It
is better than that," said Lousteau; "it is your money or your
character. A short time ago the proprietor of a minor newspaper was
refused credit. The day before yesterday it was announced in his
columns that a gold repeater set with diamonds belonging to a certain
notability had found its way in a curious fashion into the hands of a
private soldier in the Guards; the story promised to the readers might
have come from the _Arabian Nights_. The notability lost no time in
asking that editor to dine with him; the editor was distinctly a gainer
by the transaction, and contemporary history has lost an anecdote.
Whenever the press makes vehement onslaughts upon some one in power,
you may be sure that there is some refusal to do a service behind it.
Blackmailing with regard to private life is the terror of the richest
Englishman, and a great source of wealth to the press in England, which
is infinitely more corrupt than ours. We are children in comparison! In
England they will pay five or six thousand francs for a compromising
letter to sell again."

"Then how can you lay hold of Matifat?" asked Lucien.

"My
dear boy, that low tradesman wrote the queerest letters to Florine; the
spelling, style, and matter of them is ludicrous to the last degree. We
can strike him in the very midst of his Lares and Penates, where he
feels himself safest, without so much as mentioning his name; and he
cannot complain, for he lives in fear and terror of his wife. Imagine
his wrath when he sees the first number of a little serial entitled the
_Amours of a Druggist_, and is given fair warning that his love-letters
have fallen into the hands of certain journalists. He talks about the
'little god Cupid,' he tells Florine that she enables him to cross the
desert of life (which looks as if he took her for a camel), and spells
'never' with two v's. There is enough in that immensely funny
correspondence to bring an influx of subscribers for a fortnight. He
will shake in his shoes lest an anonymous letter should supply his wife
with the key to the riddle. The question is whether Florine will
consent to appear to persecute Matifat. She has some principles, which
is to say, some hopes, still left. Perhaps she means to keep the
letters and make something for herself out of them. She is cunning, as
befits my pupil. But as soon as she finds out that a bailiff is no
laughing matter, or Finot gives her a suitable present or hopes of an
engagement, she will give me the letters, and I will sell them to
Finot. Finot will put the correspondence in his uncle's hands, and
Giroudeau will bring Matifat to terms."

These confidences
sobered Lucien. His first thought was that he had some extremely
dangerous friends; his second, that it would be impolitic to break with
them; for if Mme. d'Espard, Mme. de Bargeton, and Chatelet should fail
to keep their word with him, he might need their terrible power yet. By
this time Etienne and Lucien had reached Barbet's miserable bookshop on
the Quai. Etienne addressed Barbet:

"We have five thousand
francs' worth of bills at six, nine, and twelve months, given by
Fendant and Cavalier. Are you willing to discount them for us?"

"I will give you three thousand francs for them," said Barbet with
imperturbable coolness.

"Three thousand francs!" echoed Lucien.

"Nobody
else will give you as much," rejoined the bookseller. "The firm will go
bankrupt before three months are out; but I happen to know that they
have some good books that are hanging on hand; they cannot afford to
wait, so I shall buy their stock for cash and pay them with their own
bills, and get the books at a reduction of two thousand francs. That's
how it is."

"Yes!" Lucien answered vehemently. He was dismayed by this first rebuff.

"You are making a mistake," said Etienne.

"You
won't find any one that will take their paper," said Barbet. "Your book
is their last stake, sir. The printer will not trust them; they are
obliged to leave the copies in pawn with him. If they make a hit now,
it will only stave off bankruptcy for another six months, sooner or
later they will have to go. They are cleverer at tippling than at
bookselling. In my own case, their bills mean business; and that being
so, I can afford to give more than a professional discounter who simply
looks at the signatures. It is a bill-discounter's business to know
whether the three names on a bill are each good for thirty per cent in
case of bankruptcy. And here at the outset you only offer two
signatures, and neither of them worth ten per cent."

The two
journalists exchanged glances in surprise. Here was a little scrub of a
bookseller putting the essence of the art and mystery of
bill-discounting in these few words.

"That will do, Barbet," said Lousteau. "Can you tell us of a
bill-broker that will look at us?"

"There
is Daddy Chaboisseau, on the Quai Saint-Michel, you know. He tided
Fendant over his last monthly settlement. If you won't listen to my
offer, you might go and see what he says to you; but you would only
come back to me, and then I shall offer you two thousand francs instead
of three."

Etienne and Lucien betook themselves to the Quai
Saint-Michel, and found Chaboisseau in a little house with a passage
entry. Chaboisseau, a bill-discounter, whose dealings were principally
with the book trade, lived in a second-floor lodging furnished in the
most eccentric manner. A brevet-rank banker and millionaire to boot, he
had a taste for the classical style. The cornice was in the classical
style; the bedstead, in the purest classical taste, dated from the time
of the Empire, when such things were in fashion; the purple hangings
fell over the wall like the classic draperies in the background of one
of David's pictures. Chairs and tables, lamps and sconces, and every
least detail had evidently been sought with patient care in furniture
warehouses. There was the elegance of antiquity about the classic
revival as well as its fragile and somewhat arid grace. The man
himself, like his manner of life, was in grotesque contrast with the
airy mythological look of his rooms; and it may be remarked that the
most eccentric characters are found among men who give their whole
energies to money-making.

Men of this stamp are, in a certain
sense, intellectual libertines. Everything is within their reach,
consequently their fancy is jaded, and they will make immense efforts
to shake off their indifference. The student of human nature can always
discover some hobby, some accessible weakness and sensitive spot in
their heart. Chaboisseau might have entrenched himself in antiquity as
in an impregnable camp.

"The man will be an antique to match, no doubt," said Etienne, smiling.

Chaboisseau,
a little old person with powdered hair, wore a greenish coat and
snuff-brown waistcoat; he was tricked out besides in black
small-clothes, ribbed stockings, and shoes that creaked as he came
forward to take the bills. After a short scrutiny, he returned them to
Lucien with a serious countenance.

"MM Fendant and Cavalier are delightful young fellows; they have plenty
of intelligence; but, I have no money," he said blandly.

"My friend here would be willing to meet you in the matter of
discount----" Etienne began.

"I
would not take the bills on any consideration," returned the little
broker. The words slid down upon Lousteau's suggestion like the blade
of the guillotine on a man's neck.

The two friends withdrew; but
as Chaboisseau went prudently out with them across the ante-chamber,
Lucien noticed a pile of second-hand books. Chaboisseau had been in the
trade, and this was a recent purchase. Shining conspicuous among them,
he noticed a copy of a work by the architect Ducereau, which gives
exceedingly accurate plans of various royal palaces and chateaux in
France.

"Could you let me have that book?" he asked.

"Yes," said Chaboisseau, transformed into a bookseller.

"How much?"

"Fifty francs."

"It is dear, but I want it. And I can only pay you with one of the
bills which you refuse to take."

"You have a bill there for five hundred francs at six months; I will
take that one of you," said Chaboisseau.

Apparently at the last statement of accounts, there had been a balance
of five hundred francs in favor of Fendant and Cavalier.

They
went back to the classical department. Chaboisseau made out a little
memorandum, interest so much and commission so much, total deduction
thirty francs, then he subtracted fifty francs for Ducerceau's book;
finally, from a cash-box full of coin, he took four hundred and twenty
francs.

"Look here, though, M. Chaboisseau, the bills are either all of them
good, or all bad alike; why don't you take the rest?"

"This is not discounting; I am paying myself for a sale," said the old
man.

Etienne
and Lucien were still laughing at Chaboisseau, without understanding
him, when they reached Dauriat's shop, and Etienne asked Gabusson to
give them the name of a bill-broker. Gabusson thus appealed to gave
them a letter of introduction to a broker in the Boulevard
Poissonniere, telling them at the same time that this was the "oddest
and queerest party" (to use his own expression) that he, Gabusson, had
come across. The friends took a cab by the hour, and went to the
address.

A
second-hand bookseller on the ground floor, a second-hand
clothes-dealer on the first story, and a seller of indecent prints on
the second, Samanon carried on a fourth business--he was a money-lender
into the bargain. No character in Hoffmann's romances, no
sinister-brooding miser of Scott's, can compare with this freak of
human and Parisian nature (always admitting that Samanon was human). In
spite of himself, Lucien shuddered at the sight of the dried-up little
old creature, whose bones seemed to be cutting a leather skin, spotted
with all sorts of little green and yellow patches, like a portrait by
Titian or Veronese when you look at it closely. One of Samanon's eyes
was fixed and glassy, the other lively and bright; he seemed to keep
that dead eye for the bill-discounting part of his profession, and the
other for the trade in the pornographic curiosities upstairs. A few
stray white hairs escaping from under a small, sleek, rusty black wig,
stood erect above a sallow forehead with a suggestion of menace about
it; a hollow trench in either cheek defined the outline of the jaws;
while a set of projecting teeth, still white, seemed to stretch the
skin of the lips with the effect of an equine yawn. The contrast
between the ill-assorted eyes and grinning mouth gave Samanon a
passably ferocious air; and the very bristles on the man's chin looked
stiff and sharp as pins.

Nor was there the slightest sign about
him of any desire to redeem a sinister appearance by attention to the
toilet; his threadbare jacket was all but dropping to pieces; a cravat,
which had once been black, was frayed by contact with a stubble chin,
and left on exhibition a throat as wrinkled as a turkey-gobbler's.

This
was the individual whom Etienne and Lucien discovered in his filthy
counting-house, busily affixing tickets to the backs of a parcel of
books from a recent sale. In a glance, the friends exchanged the
innumerable questions raised by the existence of such a creature; then
they presented Gabusson's introduction and Fendant and Cavalier's
bills. Samanon was still reading the note when a third comer entered,
the wearer of a short jacket, which seemed in the dimly-lighted shop to
be cut out of a piece of zinc roofing, so solid was it by reason of
alloy with all kinds of foreign matter. Oddly attired as he was, the
man was an artist of no small intellectual power, and ten years later
he was destined to assist in the inauguration of the great but
ill-founded Saint-Simonian system.

"I want my coat, my black
trousers, and satin waistcoat," said this person, pressing a numbered
ticket on Samanon's attention. Samanon touched the brass button of a
bell-pull, and a woman came down from some upper region, a Normande
apparently, to judge by her rich, fresh complexion.

"Let the
gentleman have his clothes," said Samanon, holding out a hand to the
newcomer. "It's a pleasure to do business with you, sir; but that
youngster whom one of your friends introduced to me took me in most
abominably."

"Took _him_ in!" chuckled the newcomer, pointing
out Samanon to the two journalists with an extremely comical gesture.
The great man dropped thirty sous into the money-lender's yellow,
wrinkled hand; like the Neapolitan _lazzaroni_, he was taking his best
clothes out of pawn for a state occasion. The coins dropped jingling
into the till.

"What queer business are you up to?" asked
Lousteau of the artist, an opium-eater who dwelt among visions of
enchanted palaces till he either could not or would not create.

"_He_
lends you a good deal more than an ordinary pawnbroker on anything you
pledge; and, besides, he is so awfully charitable, he allows you to
take your clothes out when you must have something to wear. I am going
to dine with the Kellers and my mistress to-night," he continued; "and
to me it is easier to find thirty sous than two hundred francs, so I
keep my wardrobe here. It has brought the charitable usurer a hundred
francs in the last six months. Samanon has devoured my library already,
volume by volume" (_livre a livre_).

"And sou by sou," Lousteau said with a laugh.

"I will let you have fifteen hundred francs," said Samanon, looking up.

Lucien
started, as if the bill-broker had thrust a red-hot skewer through his
heart. Samanon was subjecting the bills and their dates to a close
scrutiny.

"And even then," he added, "I must see Fendant first.
He ought to deposit some books with me. You aren't worth much" (turning
to Lucien); "you are living with Coralie, and your furniture has been
attached."

Lousteau, watching Lucien, saw him take up his bills,
and dash out into the street. "He is the devil himself!" exclaimed the
poet. For several seconds he stood outside gazing at the shop front.
The whole place was so pitiful, that a passer-by could not see it
without smiling at the sight, and wondering what kind of business a man
could do among those mean, dirty shelves of ticketed books.

A
very few moments later, the great man, in incognito, came out, very
well dressed, smiled at his friends, and turned to go with them in the
direction of the Passage des Panoramas, where he meant to complete his
toilet by the polishing of his boots.

"If you see Samanon in a
bookseller's shop, or calling on a paper-merchant or a printer, you may
know that it is all over with that man," said the artist. "Samanon is
the undertaker come to take the measurements for a coffin."

"You won't discount your bills now, Lucien," said Etienne.

"If
Samanon will not take them, nobody else will; he is the _ultima
ratio_," said the stranger. "He is one of Gigonnet's lambs, a spy for
Palma, Werbrust, Gobseck, and the rest of those crocodiles who swim in
the Paris money-market. Every man with a fortune to make, or unmake, is
sure to come across one of them sooner or later."

"If you cannot discount your bills at fifty per cent," remarked
Lousteau, "you must exchange them for hard cash."

"How?"

"Give
them to Coralie; Camusot will cash them for her.--You are disgusted,"
added Lousteau, as Lucien cut him short with a start. "What nonsense!
How can you allow such a silly scruple to turn the scale, when your
future is in the balance?"

"I shall take this money to Coralie in any case," began Lucien.

"Here
is more folly!" cried Lousteau. "You will not keep your creditors quiet
with four hundred francs when you must have four thousand. Let us keep
a little and get drunk on it, if we lose the rest at _rouge et noir_."

"That is sound advice," said the great man.

Those
words, spoken not four paces from Frascati's, were magnetic in their
effect. The friends dismissed their cab and went up to the gaming-table.

At
the outset they won three thousand francs, then they lost and fell to
five hundred; again they won three thousand seven hundred francs, and
again they lost all but a five-franc piece. After another turn of luck
they staked two thousand francs on an even number to double the stake
at a stroke; an even number had not turned up for five times in
succession, and this was the sixth time. They punted the whole sum, and
an odd number turned up once more.

After two hours of
all-absorbing, frenzied excitement, the two dashed down the staircase
with the hundred francs kept back for the dinner. Upon the steps,
between two pillars which support the little sheet-iron veranda to
which so many eyes have been upturned in longing or despair, Lousteau
stopped and looked into Lucien's flushed, excited face.

"Let us just try fifty francs," he said.

And
up the stairs again they went. An hour later they owned a thousand
crowns. Black had turned up for the fifth consecutive time; they
trusted that their previous luck would not repeat itself, and put the
whole sum on the red--black turned up for the sixth time. They had
lost. It was now six o'clock.

"Let us just try twenty-five francs," said Lucien.

The
new venture was soon made--and lost. The twenty-five francs went in
five stakes. Then Lucien, in a frenzy, flung down his last twenty-five
francs on the number of his age, and won. No words can describe how his
hands trembled as he raked in the coins which the bank paid him one by
one. He handed ten louis to Lousteau.

"Fly!" he cried; "take it to Very's."

Lousteau
took the hint and went to order dinner. Lucien, left alone, laid his
thirty louis on the red and won. Emboldened by the inner voice which a
gambler always hears, he staked the whole again on the red, and again
he won. He felt as if there were a furnace within him. Without heeding
the voice, he laid a hundred and twenty louis on the black and lost.
Then to the torturing excitement of suspense succeeded the delicious
feeling of relief known to the gambler who has nothing left to lose,
and must perforce leave the palace of fire in which his dreams melt and
vanish.

He found Lousteau at Very's, and flung himself upon the
cookery (to make use of Lafontaine's expression), and drowned his cares
in wine. By nine o'clock his ideas were so confused that he could not
imagine why the portress in the Rue de Vendome persisted in sending him
to the Rue de la Lune.

"Mlle. Coralie has gone," said the woman.
"She has taken lodgings elsewhere. She left her address with me on this
scrap of paper."

Lucien was too far gone to be surprised at
anything. He went back to the cab which had brought him, and was driven
to the Rue de la Lune, making puns to himself on the name of the street
as he went.

The news of the failure of the Panorama-Dramatique
had come like a thunder-clap. Coralie, taking alarm, made haste to sell
her furniture (with the consent of her creditors) to little old Cardot,
who installed Florentine in the rooms at once. The tradition of the
house remained unbroken. Coralie paid her creditors and satisfied the
landlord, proceeding with her "washing-day," as she called it, while
Berenice bought the absolutely indispensable necessaries to furnish a
fourth-floor lodging in the Rue de la Lune, a few doors from the
Gymnase. Here Coralie was waiting for Lucien's return. She had brought
her love unsullied out of the shipwreck and twelve hundred francs.

Lucien, more than half intoxicated, poured out his woes to Coralie and
Berenice.

"You
did quite right, my angel," said Coralie, with her arms about his neck.
"Berenice can easily negotiate your bills with Braulard."

The
next morning Lucien awoke to an enchanted world of happiness made about
him by Coralie. She was more loving and tender in those days than she
had ever been; perhaps she thought that the wealth of love in her heart
should make him amends for the poverty of their lodging. She looked
bewitchingly charming, with the loose hair straying from under the
crushed white silk handkerchief about her head; there was soft laughter
in her eyes; her words were as bright as the first rays of sunrise that
shone in through the windows, pouring a flood of gold upon such
charming poverty.

Not that the room was squalid. The walls were
covered with a sea-green paper, bordered with red; there was one mirror
over the chimney-piece, and a second above the chest of drawers. The
bare boards were covered with a cheap carpet, which Berenice had bought
in spite of Coralie's orders, and paid for out of her own little store.
A wardrobe, with a glass door and a chest, held the lovers' clothing,
the mahogany chairs were covered with blue cotton stuff, and Berenice
had managed to save a clock and a couple of china vases from the
catastrophe, as well as four spoons and forks and half-a-dozen little
spoons. The bedroom was entered from the dining-room, which might have
belonged to a clerk with an income of twelve hundred francs. The
kitchen was next the landing, and Berenice slept above in an attic. The
rent was not more than a hundred crowns.

The dismal house
boasted a sham carriage entrance, the porter's box being contrived
behind one of the useless leaves of the gate, and lighted by a peephole
through which that personage watched the comings and goings of
seventeen families, for this hive was a "good-paying property," in
auctioneer's phrase.

Lucien, looking round the room, discovered
a desk, an easy-chair, paper, pens, and ink. The sight of Berenice in
high spirits (she was building hopes on Coralie's _debut_ at the
Gymnase), and of Coralie herself conning her part with a knot of blue
ribbon tied about it, drove all cares and anxieties from the sobered
poet's mind.

"So long as nobody in society hears of this sudden
comedown, we shall pull through," he said. "After all, we have four
thousand five hundred francs before us. I will turn my new position in
Royalist journalism to account. To-morrow we shall start the _Reveil_;
I am an old hand now, and I will make something out."

And
Coralie, seeing nothing but love in the words, kissed the lips that
uttered them. By this time Berenice had set the table near the fire and
served a modest breakfast of scrambled eggs, a couple of cutlets,
coffee, and cream. Just then there came a knock at the door, and
Lucien, to his astonishment, beheld three of his loyal friends of old
days--d'Arthez, Leon Giraud, and Michel Chrestien. He was deeply
touched, and asked them to share the breakfast.

"No; we have
come on more serious business than condolence," said d'Arthez; "we know
the whole story, we have just come from the Rue de Vendome. You know my
opinions, Lucien. Under any other circumstances I should be glad to
hear that you had adopted my political convictions; but situated as you
are with regard to the Liberal Press, it is impossible for you to go
over to the Ultras. Your life will be sullied, your character blighted
for ever. We have come to entreat you in the name of our friendship,
weakened though it may be, not to soil yourself in this way. You have
been prominent in attacking the Romantics, the Right, and the
Government; you cannot now declare for the Government; the Right, and
the Romantics."

"My reasons for the change are based on lofty grounds; the end will
justify the means," said Lucien.

"Perhaps
you do not fully comprehend our position on the side of the
Government," said Leon Giraud. "The Government, the Court, the
Bourbons, the Absolutist Party, or to sum up in the general expression,
the whole system opposed to the constitutional system, may be divided
upon the question of the best means of extinguishing the Revolution,
but is unanimous as to the advisability of extinguishing the
newspapers. The _Reveil_, the _Foudre_, and the _Drapeau Blanc_ have
all been founded for the express purpose of replying to the slander,
gibes, and railing of the Liberal press. I cannot approve them, for it
is precisely this failure to recognize the grandeur of our priesthood
that has led us to bring out a serious and self-respecting paper; which
perhaps," he added parenthetically, "may exercise a worthy influence
before very long, and win respect, and carry weight; but this Royalist
artillery is destined for a first attempt at reprisals, the Liberals
are to be paid back in their own coin--shaft for shaft, wound for wound.

"What
can come of it Lucien? The majority of newspaper readers incline for
the Left; and in the press, as in warfare, the victory is with the big
battalions. You will be blackguards, liars, enemies of the people; the
other side will be defenders of their country, martyrs, men to be held
in honor, though they may be even more hypocritical and slippery than
their opponents. In these ways the pernicious influence of the press
will be increased, while the most odious form of journalism will
receive sanction. Insult and personalities will become a recognized
privilege of the press; newspapers have taken this tone in the
subscribers' interests; and when both sides have recourse to the same
weapons, the standard is set and the general tone of journalism taken
for granted. When the evil is developed to its fullest extent,
restrictive laws will be followed by prohibitions; there will be a
return of the censorship of the press imposed after the assassination
of the Duc de Berri, and repealed since the opening of the Chambers.
And do you know what the nation will conclude from the debate? The
people will believe the insinuations of the Liberal press; they will
think that the Bourbons mean to attack the rights of property acquired
by the Revolution, and some fine day they will rise and shake off the
Bourbons. You are not only soiling your life, Lucien, you are going
over to the losing side. You are too young, too lately a journalist,
too little initiated into the secret springs of motive and the tricks
of the craft, you have aroused too much jealousy, not to fall a victim
to the general hue and cry that will be raised against you in the
Liberal newspapers. You will be drawn into the fray by party spirit now
still at fever-heat; though the fever, which spent itself in violence
in 1815 and 1816, now appears in debates in the Chamber and polemics in
the papers."

"I am not quite a featherhead, my friends," said
Lucien, "though you may choose to see a poet in me. Whatever may
happen, I shall gain one solid advantage which no Liberal victory can
give me. By the time your victory is won, I shall have gained my end."

"We will cut off--your hair," said Michel Chrestien, with a laugh.

"I shall have my children by that time," said Lucien; "and if you cut
off my head, it will not matter."

The
three could make nothing of Lucien. Intercourse with the great world
had developed in him the pride of caste, the vanities of the
aristocrat. The poet thought, and not without reason, that there was a
fortune in his good looks and intellect, accompanied by the name and
title of Rubempre. Mme. d'Espard and Mme. de Bargeton held him fast by
this clue, as a child holds a cockchafer by a string. Lucien's flight
was circumscribed. The words, "He is one of us, he is sound,"
accidentally overheard but three days ago in Mlle. de Touches' salon,
had turned his head. The Duc de Lenoncourt, the Duc de Navarreins, the
Duc de Grandlieu, Rastignac, Blondet, the lovely Duchesse de
Maufrigneuse, the Comte d'Escrignon, and des Lupeaulx, all the most
influential people at Court in fact, had congratulated him on his
conversion, and completed his intoxication.

"Then there is no
more to be said," d'Arthez rejoined. "You, of all men, will find it
hard to keep clean hands and self-respect. I know you, Lucien; you will
feel it acutely when you are despised by the very men to whom you offer
yourself."

The three took leave, and not one of them gave him a friendly
handshake. Lucien was thoughtful and sad for a few minutes.

"Oh!
never mind those ninnies," cried Coralie, springing upon his knee and
putting her beautiful arms about his neck. "They take life seriously,
and life is a joke. Besides, you are going to be Count Lucien de
Rubempre. I will wheedle the _Chancellerie_ if there is no other way. I
know how to come round that rake of a des Lupeaulx, who will sign your
patent. Did I not tell you, Lucien, that at the last you should have
Coralie's dead body for a stepping stone?"

Next day Lucien
allowed his name to appear in the list of contributors to the _Reveil_.
His name was announced in the prospectus with a flourish of trumpets,
and the Ministry took care that a hundred thousand copies should be
scattered abroad far and wide. There was a dinner at Robert's, two
doors away from Frascati's, to celebrate the inauguration, and the
whole band of Royalist writers for the press were present. Martainville
was there, and Auger and Destains, and a host of others, still living,
who "did Monarchy and religion," to use the familiar expression coined
for them. Nathan had also enlisted under the banner, for he was
thinking of starting a theatre, and not unreasonably held that it was
better to have the licensing authorities for him than against him.

"We will pay the Liberals out," cried Merlin.

"Gentlemen,"
said Nathan, "if we are for war, let us have war in earnest; we must
not carry it on with pop-guns. Let us fall upon all Classicals and
Liberals without distinction of age or sex, and put them all to the
sword with ridicule. There must be no quarter."

"We must act
honorably; there must be no bribing with copies of books or presents;
no taking money of publishers. We must inaugurate a Restoration of
Journalism."

"Good!" said Martainville. "_Justum et tenacem
propositi virum_! Let us be implacable and virulent. I will give out La
Fayette for the prince of harlequins that he is!"

"And I will
undertake the heroes of the _Constitutionnel_," added Lucien; "Sergeant
Mercier, M. Jouy's Complete Works, and 'the illustrious orators of the
Left.'"

A war of extermination was unanimously resolved upon,
and by one o'clock in the morning all shades of opinion were merged and
drowned, together with every glimmer of sense, in a flaming bowl of
punch.

"We have had a fine Monarchical and Religious jollification," remarked
an illustrious reveler in the doorway as he went.

That
comment appeared in the next day's issue of the _Miroir_ through the
good offices of a publisher among the guests, and became historic.
Lucien was supposed to be the traitor who blabbed. His defection gave
the signal for a terrific hubbub in the Liberal camp; Lucien was the
butt of the Opposition newspapers, and ridiculed unmercifully. The
whole history of his sonnets was given to the public. Dauriat was said
to prefer a first loss of a thousand crowns to the risk of publishing
the verses; Lucien was called "the Poet sans Sonnets;" and one morning,
in that very paper in which he had so brilliant a beginning, he read
the following lines, significant enough for him, but barely
intelligible to other readers:

*** "If M. Dauriat persistently
withholds the Sonnets of the future Petrarch from publication, we will
act like generous foes. We will open our own columns to his poems,
which must be piquant indeed, to judge by the following specimen
obligingly communicated by a friend of the author."

And close upon that ominous preface followed a sonnet entitled "The
Thistle" (_le Chardon)_:

A chance-come seedling, springing up one day Among the flowers in a
garden fair, Made boast that splendid colors bright and rare Its claims
to lofty lineage should display.

So for a while they suffered
it to stay; But with such insolence it flourished there, That, out of
patience with its braggart's air, They bade it prove its claims without
delay.

It bloomed forthwith; but ne'er was blundering clown
Upon the boards more promptly hooted down; The sister flowers began to
jeer and laugh.

The owner flung it out. At close of day A solitary jackass came to
bray-- A common Thistle's fitting epitaph.

Lucien read the words through scalding tears.

Vernou
touched elsewhere on Lucien's gambling propensities, and spoke of the
forthcoming _Archer of Charles IX._ as "anti-national" in its tendency,
the writer siding with Catholic cut-throats against their Calvinist
victims.

Another week found the quarrel embittered. Lucien had
counted upon his friend Etienne; Etienne owed him a thousand francs,
and there had been besides a private understanding between them; but
Etienne Lousteau during the interval became his sworn foe, and this was
the manner of it.

For the past three months Nathan had been
smitten with Florine's charms, and much at a loss how to rid himself of
Lousteau his rival, who was in fact dependent upon the actress. And now
came Nathan's opportunity, when Florine was frantic with distress over
the failure of the Panorama-Dramatique, which left her without an
engagement. He went as Lucien's colleague to beg Coralie to ask for a
part for Florine in a play of his which was about to be produced at the
Gymnase. Then Nathan went to Florine and made capital with her out of
the service done by the promise of a conditional engagement. Ambition
turned Florine's head; she did not hesitate. She had had time to gauge
Lousteau pretty thoroughly. Lousteau's courses were weakening his will,
and here was Nathan with his ambitions in politics and literature, and
energies strong as his cravings. Florine proposed to reappear on the
stage with renewed eclat, so she handed over Matifat's correspondence
to Nathan. Nathan drove a bargain for them with Matifat, and took the
sixth share of Finot's review in exchange for the compromising billets.
After this, Florine was installed in sumptuously furnished apartments
in the Rue Hauteville, where she took Nathan for her protector in the
face of the theatrical and journalistic world.

Lousteau was
terribly overcome. He wept (towards the close of a dinner given by his
friends to console him in his affliction). In the course of that
banquet it was decided that Nathan had not acted unfairly; several
writers present--Finot and Vernou, for instance,--knew of Florine's
fervid admiration for dramatic literature; but they all agreed that
Lucien had behaved very ill when he arranged that business at the
Gymnase; he had indeed broken the most sacred laws of friendship.
Party-spirit and zeal to serve his new friends had led the Royalist
poet on to sin beyond forgiveness.

"Nathan was carried away by
passion," pronounced Bixiou, "while this 'distinguished provincial,' as
Blondet calls him, is simply scheming for his own selfish ends."

And
so it came to pass that deep plots were laid by all parties alike to
rid themselves of this little upstart intruder of a poet who wanted to
eat everybody up. Vernou bore Lucien a personal grudge, and undertook
to keep a tight hand on him; and Finot declared that Lucien had
betrayed the secret of the combination against Matifat, and thereby
swindled him (Finot) out of fifty thousand francs. Nathan, acting on
Florine's advice, gained Finot's support by selling him the sixth share
for fifteen thousand francs, and Lousteau consequently lost his
commission. His thousand crowns had vanished away; he could not forgive
Lucien for this treacherous blow (as he supposed it) dealt to his
interests. The wounds of vanity refuse to heal if oxide of silver gets
into them.

No words, no amount of description, can depict the
wrath of an author in a paroxysm of mortified vanity, nor the energy
which he discovers when stung by the poisoned darts of sarcasm; but, on
the other hand, the man that is roused to fighting-fury by a personal
attack usually subsides very promptly. The more phlegmatic race, who
take these things quietly, lay their account with the oblivion which
speedily overtakes the spiteful article. These are the truly courageous
men of letters; and if the weaklings seem at first to be the strong
men, they cannot hold out for any length of time.

During that
first fortnight, while the fury was upon him, Lucien poured a perfect
hailstorm of articles into the Royalist papers, in which he shared the
responsibilities of criticism with Hector Merlin. He was always in the
breach, pounding away with all his might in the _Reveil_, backed up by
Martainville, the only one among his associates who stood by him
without an afterthought. Martainville was not in the secret of certain
understandings made and ratified amid after-dinner jokes, or at
Dauriat's in the Wooden Galleries, or behind the scenes at the
Vaudeville, when journalists of either side met on neutral ground.

When
Lucien went to the greenroom of the Vaudeville, he met with no welcome;
the men of his own party held out a hand to shake, the others cut him;
and all the while Hector Merlin and Theodore Gaillard fraternized
unblushingly with Finot, Lousteau, and Vernou, and the rest of the
journalists who were known for "good fellows."

The greenroom of
the Vaudeville in those days was a hotbed of gossip, as well as a
neutral ground where men of every shade of opinion could meet; so much
so that the President of a court of law, after reproving a learned
brother in a certain council chamber for "sweeping the greenroom with
his gown," met the subject of his strictures, gown to gown, in the
greenroom of the Vaudeville. Lousteau, in time, shook hands again with
Nathan; Finot came thither almost every evening; and Lucien, whenever
he could spare the time, went to the Vaudeville to watch the enemies,
who showed no sign of relenting towards the unfortunate boy.

In
the time of the Restoration party hatred was far more bitter than in
our day. Intensity of feeling is diminished in our high-pressure age.
The critic cuts a book to pieces and shakes hands with the author
afterwards, and the victim must keep on good terms with his
slaughterer, or run the gantlet of innumerable jokes at his expense. If
he refuses, he is unsociable, eaten up with self-love, he is sulky and
rancorous, he bears malice, he is a bad bed-fellow. To-day let an
author receive a treacherous stab in the back, let him avoid the snares
set for him with base hypocrisy, and endure the most unhandsome
treatment, he must still exchange greetings with his assassin, who, for
that matter, claims the esteem and friendship of his victim. Everything
can be excused and justified in an age which has transformed vice into
virtue and virtue into vice. Good-fellowship has come to be the most
sacred of our liberties; the representatives of the most opposite
opinions courteously blunt the edge of their words, and fence with
buttoned foils. But in those almost forgotten days the same theatre
could scarcely hold certain Royalist and Liberal journalists; the most
malignant provocation was offered, glances were like pistol-shots, the
least spark produced an explosion of quarrel. Who has not heard his
neighbor's half-smothered oath on the entrance of some man in the
forefront of the battle on the opposing side? There were but two
parties--Royalists and Liberals, Classics and Romantics. You found the
same hatred masquerading in either form, and no longer wondered at the
scaffolds of the Convention.

Lucien had been a Liberal and a hot
Voltairean; now he was a rabid Royalist and a Romantic. Martainville,
the only one among his colleagues who really liked him and stood by him
loyally, was more hated by the Liberals than any man on the Royalist
side, and this fact drew down all the hate of the Liberals on Lucien's
head. Martainville's staunch friendship injured Lucien. Political
parties show scanty gratitude to outpost sentinels, and leave leaders
of forlorn hopes to their fate; 'tis a rule of warfare which holds
equally good in matters political, to keep with the main body of the
army if you mean to succeed. The spite of the small Liberal papers
fastened at once on the opportunity of coupling the two names, and
flung them into each other's arms. Their friendship, real or imaginary,
brought down upon them both a series of articles written by pens dipped
in gall. Felicien Vernou was furious with jealousy of Lucien's social
success; and believed, like all his old associates, in the poet's
approaching elevation.

The fiction of Lucien's treason was
embellished with every kind of aggravating circumstance; he was called
Judas the Less, Martainville being Judas the Great, for Martainville
was supposed (rightly or wrongly) to have given up the Bridge of Pecq
to the foreign invaders. Lucien said jestingly to des Lupeaulx that he
himself, surely, had given up the Asses' Bridge.

Lucien's
luxurious life, hollow though it was, and founded on expectations, had
estranged his friends. They could not forgive him for the carriage
which he had put down--for them he was still rolling about in it--nor
yet for the splendors of the Rue de Vendome which he had left. All of
them felt instinctively that nothing was beyond the reach of this young
and handsome poet, with intellect enough and to spare; they themselves
had trained him in corruption; and, therefore, they left no stone
unturned to ruin him.

Some few days before Coralie's first
appearance at the Gymnase, Lucien and Hector Merlin went arm-in-arm to
the Vaudeville. Merlin was scolding his friend for giving a helping
hand to Nathan in Florine's affair.

"You then and there made two
mortal enemies of Lousteau and Nathan," he said. "I gave you good
advice, and you took no notice of it. You gave praise, you did them a
good turn--you will be well punished for your kindness. Florine and
Coralie will never live in peace on the same stage; both will wish to
be first. You can only defend Coralie in our papers; and Nathan not
only has a pull as a dramatic author, he can control the dramatic
criticism in the Liberal newspapers. He has been a journalist a little
longer than you!"

The words responded to Lucien's inward
misgivings. Neither Nathan nor Gaillard was treating him with the
frankness which he had a right to expect, but so new a convert could
hardly complain. Gaillard utterly confounded Lucien by saying roundly
that newcomers must give proofs of their sincerity for some time before
their party could trust them. There was more jealousy than he had
imagined in the inner circles of Royalist and Ministerial journalism.
The jealousy of curs fighting for a bone is apt to appear in the human
species when there is a loaf to divide; there is the same growling and
showing of teeth, the same characteristics come out.

In every
possible way these writers of articles tried to injure each other with
those in power; they brought reciprocal accusations of lukewarm zeal;
they invented the most treacherous ways of getting rid of a rival.
There had been none of this internecine warfare among the Liberals;
they were too far from power, too hopelessly out of favor; and Lucien,
amid the inextricable tangle of ambitions, had neither the courage to
draw sword and cut the knot, or the patience to unravel it. He could
not be the Beaumarchais, the Aretino, the Freron of his epoch; he was
not made of such stuff; he thought of nothing but his one desire, the
patent of nobility; for he saw clearly that for him such a restoration
meant a wealthy marriage, and, the title once secured, chance and his
good looks would do the rest. This was all his plan, and Etienne
Lousteau, who had confided so much to him, knew his secret, knew how to
deal a deathblow to the poet of Angouleme. That very night, as Lucien
and Merlin went to the Vaudeville, Etienne had laid a terrible trap,
into which an inexperienced boy could not but fall.

"Here is our
handsome Lucien," said Finot, drawing des Lupeaulx in the direction of
the poet, and shaking hands with feline amiability. "I cannot think of
another example of such rapid success," continued Finot, looking from
des Lupeaulx to Lucien. "There are two sorts of success in Paris: there
is a fortune in solid cash, which any one can amass, and there is the
intangible fortune of connections, position, or a footing in certain
circles inaccessible for certain persons, however rich they may be. Now
my friend here----"

"Our friend," interposed des Lupeaulx, smiling blandly.

"Our
friend," repeated Finot, patting Lucien's hand, "has made a brilliant
success from this point of view. Truth to tell, Lucien has more in him,
more gift, more wit than the rest of us that envy him, and he is
enchantingly handsome besides; his old friends cannot forgive him for
his success--they call it luck."

"Luck of that sort never comes
to fools or incapables," said des Lupeaulx. "Can you call Bonaparte's
fortune luck, eh? There were a score of applicants for the command of
the army in Italy, just as there are a hundred young men at this moment
who would like to have an entrance to Mlle. des Touches' house; people
are coupling her name with yours already in society, my dear boy," said
des Lupeaulx, clapping Lucien on the shoulder. "Ah! you are in high
favor. Mme. d'Espard, Mme. de Bargeton, and Mme. de Montcornet are wild
about you. You are going to Mme. Firmiani's party to-night, are you
not, and to the Duchesse de Grandlieu's rout to-morrow?"

"Yes," said Lucien.

"Allow
me to introduce a young banker to you, a M. du Tillet; you ought to be
acquainted, he has contrived to make a great fortune in a short time."

Lucien
and du Tillet bowed, and entered into conversation, and the banker
asked Lucien to dinner. Finot and des Lupeaulx, a well-matched pair,
knew each other well enough to keep upon good terms; they turned away
to continue their chat on one of the sofas in the greenroom, and left
Lucien with du Tillet, Merlin, and Nathan.

"By the way, my
friend," said Finot, "tell me how things stand. Is there really
somebody behind Lucien? For he is the _bete noire_ of my staff; and
before allowing them to plot against him, I thought I should like to
know whether, in your opinion, it would be better to baffle them and
keep well with him."

The Master of Requests and Finot looked at each other very closely for
a moment or two.

"My
dear fellow," said des Lupeaulx, "how can you imagine that the Marquise
d'Espard, or Chatelet, or Mme. de Bargeton--who has procured the
Baron's nomination to the prefecture and the title of Count, so as to
return in triumph to Angouleme--how can you suppose that any of them
will forgive Lucien for his attacks on them? They dropped him down in
the Royalist ranks to crush him out of existence. At this moment they
are looking round for any excuse for not fulfilling the promises they
made to that boy. Help them to some; you will do the greatest possible
service to the two women, and some day or other they will remember it.
I am in their secrets; I was surprised to find how much they hated the
little fellow. This Lucien might have rid himself of his bitterest
enemy (Mme. de Bargeton) by desisting from his attacks on terms which a
woman loves to grant--do you take me? He is young and handsome, he
should have drowned her hate in torrents of love, he would be Comte de
Rubempre by this time; the Cuttlefish-bone would have obtained some
sinecure for him, some post in the Royal Household. Lucien would have
made a very pretty reader to Louis XVIII.; he might have been librarian
somewhere or other, Master of Requests for a joke, Master of Revels,
what you please. The young fool has missed his chance. Perhaps that is
his unpardonable sin. Instead of imposing his conditions, he has
accepted them. When Lucien was caught with the bait of the patent of
nobility, the Baron Chatelet made a great step. Coralie has been the
ruin of that boy. If he had not had the actress for his mistress, he
would have turned again to the Cuttlefish-bone; and he would have had
her too."

"Then we can knock him over?"

"How?" des Lupeaulx asked carelessly. He saw a way of gaining credit
with the Marquise d'Espard for this service.

"He
is under contract to write for Lousteau's paper, and we can the better
hold him to his agreement because he has not a sou. If we tickle up the
Keeper of the Seals with a facetious article, and prove that Lucien
wrote it, he will consider that Lucien is unworthy of the King's favor.
We have a plot on hand besides. Coralie will be ruined, and our
distinguished provincial will lose his head when his mistress is hissed
off the stage and left without an engagement. When once the patent is
suspended, we will laugh at the victim's aristocratic pretensions, and
allude to his mother the nurse and his father the apothecary. Lucien's
courage is only skindeep, he will collapse; we will send him back to
his provinces. Nathan made Florine sell me Matifat's sixth share of the
review, I was able to buy; Dauriat and I are the only proprietors now;
we might come to an understanding, you and I, and the review might be
taken over for the benefit of the Court. I stipulated for the
restitution of my sixth before I undertook to protect Nathan and
Florine; they let me have it, and I must help them; but I wished to
know first how Lucien stood----"

"Very well. Then can you arrange a definite engagement for Florine?"
asked Finot.

"Yes, but rid us of Lucien, for Rastignac and de Marsay never wish to
hear of him again."

"Sleep
in peace," returned Finot. "Nathan and Merlin will always have articles
ready for Gaillard, who will promise to take them; Lucien will never
get a line into the paper. We will cut off his supplies. There is only
Martainville's paper left him in which to defend himself and Coralie;
what can a single paper do against so many?"

"I will let you
know the weak points of the Ministry; but get Lucien to write that
article and hand over the manuscript," said des Lupeaulx, who refrained
carefully from informing Finot that Lucien's promised patent was
nothing but a joke.

When des Lupeaulx had gone, Finot went to
Lucien, and taking the good-natured tone which deceives so many
victims, he explained that he could not possibly afford to lose his
contributor, and at the same time he shrank from taking proceedings
which might ruin him with his friends of the other side. Finot himself
liked a man who was strong enough to change his opinions. They were
pretty sure to come across one another, he and Lucien, and might be
mutually helpful in a thousand little ways. Lucien, besides, needed a
sure man in the Liberal party to attack the Ultras and men in office
who might refuse to help him.

"Suppose that they play you false,
what will you do?" Finot ended. "Suppose that some Minister fancies
that he has you fast by the halter of your apostasy, and turns the cold
shoulder on you? You will be glad to set on a few dogs to snap at his
legs, will you not? Very well. But you have made a deadly enemy of
Lousteau; he is thirsting for your blood. You and Felicien are not on
speaking terms. I only remain to you. It is a rule of the craft to keep
a good understanding with every man of real ability. In the world which
you are about to enter you can do me services in return for mine with
the press. But business first. Let me have purely literary articles;
they will not compromise you, and we shall have executed our agreement."

Lucien
saw nothing but good-fellowship and a shrewd eye to business in Finot's
offer; Finot and des Lupeaulx had flattered him, and he was in a good
humor. He actually thanked Finot!

Ambitious men, like all those
who can only make their way by the help of others and of circumstances,
are bound to lay their plans very carefully and to adhere very closely
to the course of conduct on which they determine; it is a cruel moment
in the lives of such aspirants when some unknown power brings the
fabric of their fortunes to some severe test and everything gives way
at once; threads are snapped or entangled, and misfortune appears on
every side. Let a man lose his head in the confusion, it is all over
with him; but if he can resist this first revolt of circumstances, if
he can stand erect until the tempest passes over, or make a supreme
effort and reach the serene sphere about the storm--then he is really
strong. To every man, unless he is born rich, there comes sooner or
later "his fatal week," as it must be called. For Napoleon, for
instance, that week was the Retreat from Moscow. It had begun now for
Lucien.

Social and literary success had come to him too easily;
he had had such luck that he was bound to know reverses and to see men
and circumstances turn against him.

The first blow was the
heaviest and the most keenly felt, for it touched Lucien where he
thought himself invulnerable--in his heart and his love. Coralie might
not be clever, but hers was a noble nature, and she possessed the great
actress' faculty of suddenly standing aloof from self. This strange
phenomenon is subject, until it degenerates into a habit with long
practice, to the caprices of character, and not seldom to an admirable
delicacy of feeling in actresses who are still young. Coralie, to all
appearance bold and wanton, as the part required, was in reality
girlish and timid, and love had wrought in her a revulsion of her
woman's heart against the comedian's mask. Art, the supreme art of
feigning passion and feeling, had not yet triumphed over nature in her;
she shrank before a great audience from the utterance that belongs to
Love alone; and Coralie suffered besides from another true woman's
weakness--she needed success, born stage queen though she was. She
could not confront an audience with which she was out of sympathy; she
was nervous when she appeared on the stage, a cold reception paralyzed
her. Each new part gave her the terrible sensations of a first
appearance. Applause produced a sort of intoxication which gave her
encouragement without flattering her vanity; at a murmur of
dissatisfaction or before a silent house, she flagged; but a great
audience following attentively, admiringly, willing to be pleased,
electrified Coralie. She felt at once in communication with the nobler
qualities of all those listeners; she felt that she possessed the power
of stirring their souls and carrying them with her. But if this action
and reaction of the audience upon the actress reveals the nervous
organization of genius, it shows no less clearly the poor child's
sensitiveness and delicacy. Lucien had discovered the treasures of her
nature; had learned in the past months that this woman who loved him
was still so much of a girl. And Coralie was unskilled in the wiles of
an actress --she could not fight her own battles nor protect herself
against the machinations of jealousy behind the scenes. Florine was
jealous of her, and Florine was as dangerous and depraved as Coralie
was simple and generous. Roles must come to find Coralie; she was too
proud to implore authors or to submit to dishonoring conditions; she
would not give herself to the first journalist who persecuted her with
his advances and threatened her with his pen. Genius is rare enough in
the extraordinary art of the stage; but genius is only one condition of
success among many, and is positively hurtful unless it is accompanied
by a genius for intrigue in which Coralie was utterly lacking.

Lucien
knew how much his friend would suffer on her first appearance at the
Gymnase, and was anxious at all costs to obtain a success for her; but
all the money remaining from the sale of the furniture and all Lucien's
earnings had been sunk in costumes, in the furniture of a
dressing-room, and the expenses of a first appearance.

A few
days later, Lucien made up his mind to a humiliating step for love's
sake. He took Fendant and Cavalier's bills, and went to the _Golden
Cocoon_ in the Rue des Bourdonnais. He would ask Camusot to discount
them. The poet had not fallen so low that he could make this attempt
quite coolly. There had been many a sharp struggle first, and the way
to that decision had been paved with many dreadful thoughts.
Nevertheless, he arrived at last in the dark, cheerless little private
office that looked out upon a yard, and found Camusot seated gravely
there; this was not Coralie's infatuated adorer, not the easy-natured,
indolent, incredulous libertine whom he had known hitherto as Camusot,
but a heavy father of a family, a merchant grown old in shrewd
expedients of business and respectable virtues, wearing a magistrate's
mask of judicial prudery; this Camusot was the cool, business-like head
of the firm surrounded by clerks, green cardboard boxes, pigeonholes,
invoices, and samples, and fortified by the presence of a wife and a
plainly-dressed daughter. Lucien trembled from head to foot as he
approached; for the worthy merchant, like the money-lenders, turned
cool, indifferent eyes upon him.

"Here are two or three bills,
monsieur," he said, standing beside the merchant, who did not rise from
his desk. "If you will take them of me, you will oblige me extremely."

"You have taken something of _me_, monsieur," said Camusot; "I do not
forget it."

On
this, Lucien explained Coralie's predicament. He spoke in a low voice,
bending to murmur his explanation, so that Camusot could hear the heavy
throbbing of the humiliated poet's heart. It was no part of Camusot's
plans that Coralie should suffer a check. He listened, smiling to
himself over the signatures on the bills (for, as a judge at the
Tribunal of Commerce, he knew how the booksellers stood), but in the
end he gave Lucien four thousand five hundred francs for them,
stipulating that he should add the formula "For value received in
silks."

Lucien went straight to Braulard, and made arrangements
for a good reception. Braulard promised to come to the dress-rehearsal,
to determine on the points where his "Romans" should work their fleshy
clappers to bring down the house in applause. Lucien gave the rest of
the money to Coralie (he did not tell her how he had come by it), and
allayed her anxieties and the fears of Berenice, who was sorely
troubled over their daily expenses.

Martainville came several
times to hear Coralie rehearse, and he knew more of the stage than most
men of his time; several Royalist writers had promised favorable
articles; Lucien had not a suspicion of the impending disaster.

A
fatal event occurred on the evening before Coralie's _debut_.
D'Arthez's book had appeared; and the editor of Merlin's paper,
considering Lucien to be the best qualified man on the staff, gave him
the book to review. He owed his unlucky reputation to those articles on
Nathan's work. There were several men in the office at the time, for
all the staff had been summoned; Martainville was explaining that the
party warfare with the Liberals must be waged on certain lines. Nathan,
Merlin, all the contributors, in fact, were talking of Leon Giraud's
paper, and remarking that its influence was the more pernicious because
the language was guarded, cool, moderate. People were beginning to
speak of the circle in the Rue des Quatre-Vents as a second Convention.
It had been decided that the Royalist papers were to wage a systematic
war of extermination against these dangerous opponents, who, indeed, at
a later day, were destined to sow the doctrines that drove the Bourbons
into exile; but that was only after the most brilliant of Royalist
writers had joined them for the sake of a mean revenge.

D'Arthez's
absolutist opinions were not known; it was taken for granted that he
shared the views of his clique, he fell under the same anathema, and he
was to be the first victim. His book was to be honored with "a slashing
article," to use the consecrated formula. Lucien refused to write the
article. Great was the commotion among the leading Royalist writers
thus met in conclave. Lucien was told plainly that a renegade could not
do as he pleased; if it did not suit his views to take the side of the
Monarchy and Religion, he could go back to the other camp. Merlin and
Martainville took him aside and begged him, as his friends, to remember
that he would simply hand Coralie over to the tender mercies of the
Liberal papers, for she would find no champions on the Royalist and
Ministerial side. Her acting was certain to provoke a hot battle, and
the kind of discussion which every actress longs to arouse.

"You
don't understand it in the least," said Martainville; "if she plays for
three months amid a cross-fire of criticism, she will make thirty
thousand francs when she goes on tour in the provinces at the end of
the season; and here are you about to sacrifice Coralie and your own
future, and to quarrel with your own bread and butter, all for a
scruple that will always stand in your way, and ought to be got rid of
at once."

Lucien was forced to choose between d'Arthez and
Coralie. His mistress would be ruined unless he dealt his friend a
death-blow in the _Reveil_ and the great newspaper. Poor poet! He went
home with death in his soul; and by the fireside he sat and read that
finest production of modern literature. Tears fell fast over it as the
pages turned. For a long while he hesitated, but at last he took up the
pen and wrote a sarcastic article of the kind that he understood so
well, taking the book as children might take some bright bird to strip
it of its plumage and torture it. His sardonic jests were sure to tell.
Again he turned to the book, and as he read it over a second time, his
better self awoke. In the dead of night he hurried across Paris, and
stood outside d'Arthez's house. He looked up at the windows and saw the
faint pure gleam of light in the panes, as he had so often seen it,
with a feeling of admiration for the noble steadfastness of that truly
great nature. For some moments he stood irresolute on the curbstone; he
had not courage to go further; but his good angel urged him on. He
tapped at the door and opened, and found d'Arthez sitting reading in a
fireless room.

"What has happened?" asked d'Arthez, for news of some dreadful kind was
visible in Lucien's ghastly face.

"Your book is sublime, d'Arthez," said Lucien, with tears in his eyes,
"and they have ordered me to write an attack upon it."

"Poor boy! the bread that they give you is hard indeed!" said d'Arthez

"I
only ask for one favor, keep my visit a secret and leave me to my hell,
to the occupations of the damned. Perhaps it is impossible to attain to
success until the heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive
spot."

"The same as ever!" cried d'Arthez.

"Do you think me a base poltroon? No, d'Arthez; no, I am a boy half
crazed with love," and he told his story.

"Let us look at the article," said d'Arthez, touched by all that Lucien
said of Coralie.

Lucien held out the manuscript; d'Arthez read, and could not help
smiling.

"Oh,
what a fatal waste of intellect!" he began. But at the sight of Lucien
overcome with grief in the opposite armchair, he checked himself.

"Will
you leave it with me to correct? I will let you have it again
to-morrow," he went on. "Flippancy depreciates a work; serious and
conscientious criticism is sometimes praise in itself. I know a way to
make your article more honorable both for yourself and for me. Besides,
I know my faults well enough."

"When you climb a hot, shadowless
hillside, you sometimes find fruit to quench your torturing thirst; and
I have found it here and now," said Lucien, as he sprang sobbing to
d'Arthez's arms and kissed his friend on the forehead. "It seems to me
that I am leaving my conscience in your keeping; some day I will come
to you and ask for it again."

"I look upon a periodical
repentance as great hypocrisy," d'Arthez said solemnly; "repentance
becomes a sort of indemnity for wrongdoing. Repentance is virginity of
the soul, which we must keep for God; a man who repents twice is a
horrible sycophant. I am afraid that you regard repentance as
absolution."

Lucien went slowly back to the Rue de la Lune, stricken dumb by those
words.

Next
morning d'Arthez sent back his article, recast throughout, and Lucien
sent it in to the review; but from that day melancholy preyed upon him,
and he could not always disguise his mood. That evening, when the
theatre was full, he experienced for the first time the paroxysm of
nervous terror caused by a _debut_; terror aggravated in his case by
all the strength of his love. Vanity of every kind was involved. He
looked over the rows of faces as a criminal eyes the judges and the
jury on whom his life depends. A murmur would have set him quivering;
any slight incident upon the stage, Coralie's exits and entrances, the
slightest modulation of the tones of her voice, would perturb him
beyond all reason.

The play in which Coralie made her first
appearance at the Gymnase was a piece of the kind which sometimes falls
flat at first, and afterwards has immense success. It fell flat that
night. Coralie was not applauded when she came on, and the chilly
reception reacted upon her. The only applause came from Camusot's box,
and various persons posted in the balcony and galleries silenced
Camusot with repeated cries of "Hush!" The galleries even silenced the
_claqueurs_ when they led off with exaggerated salvos. Martainville
applauded bravely; Nathan, Merlin, and the treacherous Florine followed
his example; but it was clear that the piece was a failure. A crowd
gathered in Coralie's dressing-room and consoled her, till she had no
courage left. She went home in despair, less for her own sake than for
Lucien's.

"Braulard has betrayed us," Lucien said.

Coralie
was heartstricken. The next day found her in a high fever, utterly
unfit to play, face to face with the thought that she had been cut
short in her career. Lucien hid the papers from her, and looked them
over in the dining-room. The reviewers one and all attributed the
failure of the piece to Coralie; she had overestimated her strength;
she might be the delight of a boulevard audience, but she was out of
her element at the Gymnase; she had been inspired by a laudable
ambition, but she had not taken her powers into account; she had chosen
a part to which she was quite unequal. Lucien read on through a pile of
penny-a-lining, put together on the same system as his attack upon
Nathan. Milo of Crotona, when he found his hands fast in the oak which
he himself had cleft, was not more furious than Lucien. He grew haggard
with rage. His friends gave Coralie the most treacherous advice, in the
language of kindly counsel and friendly interest. She should play
(according to these authorities) all kind of roles, which the
treacherous writers of these unblushing _feuilletons_ knew to be
utterly unsuited to her genius. And these were the Royalist papers, led
off by Nathan. As for the Liberal press, all the weapons which Lucien
had used were now turned against him.

Coralie heard a sob,
followed by another and another. She sprang out of bed to find Lucien,
and saw the papers. Nothing would satisfy her but she must read them
all; and when she had read them, she went back to bed, and lay there in
silence.

Florine was in the plot; she had foreseen the outcome;
she had studied Coralie's part, and was ready to take her place. The
management, unwilling to give up the piece, was ready to take Florine
in Coralie's stead. When the manager came, he found poor Coralie
sobbing and exhausted on her bed; but when he began to say, in Lucien's
presence, that Florine knew the part, and that the play must be given
that evening, Coralie sprang up at once.

"I will play!" she cried, and sank fainting on the floor.

So
Florine took the part, and made her reputation in it; for the piece
succeeded, the newspapers all sang her praises, and from that time
forth Florine was the great actress whom we all know. Florine's success
exasperated Lucien to the highest degree.

"A wretched girl, whom
you helped to earn her bread! If the Gymnase prefers to do so, let the
management pay you to cancel your engagement. I shall be the Comte de
Rubempre; I will make my fortune, and you shall be my wife."

"What nonsense!" said Coralie, looking at him with wan eyes.

"Nonsense!"
repeated he. "Very well, wait a few days, and you shall live in a fine
house, you shall have a carriage, and I will write a part for you!"

He
took two thousand francs and hurried to Frascati's. For seven hours the
unhappy victim of the Furies watched his varying luck, and outwardly
seemed cool and self-contained. He experienced both extremes of fortune
during that day and part of the night that followed; at one time he
possessed as much as thirty thousand francs, and he came out at last
without a sou. In the Rue de la Lune he found Finot waiting for him
with a request for one of his short articles. Lucien so far forgot
himself, that he complained.

"Oh, it is not all rosy," returned
Finot. "You made your right-about-face in such a way that you were
bound to lose the support of the Liberal press, and the Liberals are
far stronger in print than all the Ministerialist and Royalist papers
put together. A man should never leave one camp for another until he
has made a comfortable berth for himself, by way of consolation for the
losses that he must expect; and in any case, a prudent politician will
see his friends first, and give them his reasons for going over, and
take their opinions. You can still act together; they sympathize with
you, and you agree to give mutual help. Nathan and Merlin did that
before they went over. Hawks don't pike out hawks' eyes. You were as
innocent as a lamb; you will be forced to show your teeth to your new
party to make anything out of them. You have been necessarily
sacrificed to Nathan. I cannot conceal from you that your article on
d'Arthez has roused a terrific hubbub. Marat is a saint compared with
you. You will be attacked, and your book will be a failure. How far
have things gone with your romance?"

"These are the last proof sheets."

"All
the anonymous articles against that young d'Arthez in the
Ministerialist and Ultra papers are set down to you. The _Reveil_ is
poking fun at the set in the Rue des Quatre-Vents, and the hits are the
more telling because they are funny. There is a whole serious political
coterie at the back of Leon Giraud's paper; they will come into power
too, sooner or later."

"I have not written a line in the _Reveil_ this week past."

"Very
well. Keep my short articles in mind. Write fifty of them straight off,
and I will pay you for them in a lump; but they must be of the same
color as the paper." And Finot, with seeming carelessness, gave Lucien
an edifying anecdote of the Keeper of the Seals, a piece of current
gossip, he said, for the subject of one of the papers.

Eager to
retrieve his losses at play, Lucien shook off his dejection, summoned
up his energy and youthful force, and wrote thirty articles of two
columns each. These finished, he went to Dauriat's, partly because he
felt sure of meeting Finot there, and he wished to give the articles to
Finot in person; partly because he wished for an explanation of the
non-appearance of the _Marguerites_. He found the bookseller's shop
full of his enemies. All the talk immediately ceased as he entered. Put
under the ban of journalism, his courage rose, and once more he said to
himself, as he had said in the alley at the Luxembourg, "I will
triumph."

Dauriat was neither amiable or inclined to patronize;
he was sarcastic in tone, and determined not to bate an inch of his
rights. The _Marguerites_ should appear when it suited his purpose; he
should wait until Lucien was in a position to secure the success of the
book; it was his, he had bought it outright. When Lucien asserted that
Dauriat was bound to publish the _Marguerites_ by the very nature of
the contract, and the relative positions of the parties to the
agreement, Dauriat flatly contradicted him, said that no publisher
could be compelled by law to publish at a loss, and that he himself was
the best judge of the expediency of producing the book. There was,
besides, a remedy open to Lucien, as any court of law would admit--the
poet was quite welcome to take his verses to a Royalist publisher upon
the repayment of the thousand crowns.

Lucien went away.
Dauriat's moderate tone had exasperated him even more than his previous
arrogance at their first interview. So the _Marguerites_ would not
appear until Lucien had found a host of formidable supporters, or grown
formidable himself! He walked home slowly, so oppressed and out of
heart that he felt ready for suicide. Coralie lay in bed, looking white
and ill.

"She must have a part, or she will die," said Berenice,
as Lucien dressed for a great evening party at Mlle. des Touches' house
in the Rue du Mont Blanc. Des Lupeaulx and Vignon and Blondet were to
be there, as well as Mme. d'Espard and Mme. de Bargeton.

The
party was given in honor of Conti, the great composer, owner likewise
of one of the most famous voices off the stage, Cinti, Pasta, Garcia,
Levasseur, and two or three celebrated amateurs in society not
excepted. Lucien saw the Marquise, her cousin, and Mme. de Montcornet
sitting together, and made one of the party. The unhappy young fellow
to all appearances was light-hearted, happy, and content; he jested, he
was the Lucien de Rubempre of his days of splendor, he would not seem
to need help from any one. He dwelt on his services to the Royalist
party, and cited the hue and cry raised after him by the Liberal press
as a proof of his zeal.

"And you will be well rewarded, my
friend," said Mme. de Bargeton, with a gracious smile. "Go to the
_Chancellerie_ the day after to-morrow with 'the Heron' and des
Lupeaulx, and you will find your patent signed by His Majesty. The
Keeper of the Seals will take it to-morrow to the Tuileries, but there
is to be a meeting of the Council, and he will not come back till late.
Still, if I hear the result to-morrow evening, I will let you know.
Where are you living?"

"I will come to you," said Lucien, ashamed to confess that he was
living in the Rue de la Lune.

"The
Duc de Lenoncourt and the Duc de Navarreins have made mention of you to
the King," added the Marquise; "they praised your absolute and entire
devotion, and said that some distinction ought to avenge your treatment
in the Liberal press. The name and title of Rubempre, to which you have
a claim through your mother, would become illustrious through you, they
said. The King gave his lordship instructions that evening to prepare a
patent authorizing the Sieur Lucien Chardon to bear the arms and title
of the Comtes de Rubempre, as grandson of the last Count by the
mother's side. 'Let us favor the songsters' (_chardonnerets_) 'of
Pindus,' said his Majesty, after reading your sonnet on the Lily, which
my cousin luckily remembered to give the Duke.--'Especially when the
King can work miracles, and change the song-bird into an eagle,' M. de
Navarreins replied."

Lucien's expansion of feeling would have
softened the heart of any woman less deeply wounded than Louise
d'Espard de Negrepelisse; but her thirst for vengeance was only
increased by Lucien's graciousness. Des Lupeaulx was right; Lucien was
wanting in tact. It never crossed his mind that this history of the
patent was one of the mystifications at which Mme. d'Espard was an
adept. Emboldened with success and the flattering distinction shown to
him by Mlle. des Touches, he stayed till two o'clock in the morning for
a word in private with his hostess. Lucien had learned in Royalist
newspaper offices that Mlle. des Touches was the author of a play in
which _La petite Fay_, the marvel of the moment was about to appear. As
the rooms emptied, he drew Mlle. des Touches to a sofa in the boudoir,
and told the story of Coralie's misfortune and his own so touchingly,
that Mlle. des Touches promised to give the heroine's part to his
friend.

That promise put new life into Coralie. But the next
day, as they breakfasted together, Lucien opened Lousteau's newspaper,
and found that unlucky anecdote of the Keeper of the Seals and his
wife. The story was full of the blackest malice lurking in the most
caustic wit. Louis XVIII. was brought into the story in a masterly
fashion, and held up to ridicule in such a way that prosecution was
impossible. Here is the substance of a fiction for which the Liberal
party attempted to win credence, though they only succeeded in adding
one more to the tale of their ingenious calumnies.

The King's
passion for pink-scented notes and a correspondence full of madrigals
and sparkling wit was declared to be the last phase of the tender
passion; love had reached the Doctrinaire stage; or had passed, in
other words, from the concrete to the abstract. The illustrious lady,
so cruelly ridiculed under the name of Octavie by Beranger, had
conceived (so it was said) the gravest fears. The correspondence was
languishing. The more Octavie displayed her wit, the cooler grew the
royal lover. At last Octavie discovered the cause of her decline; her
power was threatened by the novelty and piquancy of a correspondence
between the august scribe and the wife of his Keeper of the Seals. That
excellent woman was believed to be incapable of writing a note; she was
simply and solely godmother to the efforts of audacious ambition. Who
could be hidden behind her petticoats? Octavie decided, after making
observations of her own, that the King was corresponding with his
Minister.

She laid her plans. With the help of a faithful
friend, she arranged that a stormy debate should detain the Minister at
the Chamber; then she contrived to secure a _tete-a-tete_, and to
convince outraged Majesty of the fraud. Louis XVIII. flew into a royal
and truly Bourbon passion, but the tempest broke on Octavie's head. He
would not believe her. Octavie offered immediate proof, begging the
King to write a note which must be answered at once. The unlucky wife
of the Keeper of the Seals sent to the Chamber for her husband; but
precautions had been taken, and at that moment the Minister was on his
legs addressing the Chamber. The lady racked her brains and replied to
the note with such intellect as she could improvise.

"Your Chancellor will supply the rest," cried Octavie, laughing at the
King's chagrin.

There
was not a word of truth in the story; but it struck home to three
persons--the Keeper of the Seals, his wife, and the King. It was said
that des Lupeaulx had invented the tale, but Finot always kept his
counsel. The article was caustic and clever, the Liberal papers and the
Orleanists were delighted with it, and Lucien himself laughed, and
thought of it merely as a very amusing _canard_.

He called next
day for des Lupeaulx and the Baron du Chatelet. The Baron had just been
to thank his lordship. The Sieur Chatelet, newly appointed Councillor
Extraordinary, was now Comte du Chatelet, with a promise of the
prefecture of the Charente so soon as the present prefect should have
completed the term of office necessary to receive the maximum retiring
pension. The Comte _du_ Chatelet (for the _du_ had been inserted in the
patent) drove with Lucien to the _Chancellerie_, and treated his
companion as an equal. But for Lucien's articles, he said, his patent
would not have been granted so soon; Liberal persecution had been a
stepping-stone to advancement. Des Lupeaulx was waiting for them in the
Secretary-General's office. That functionary started with surprise when
Lucien appeared and looked at des Lupeaulx.

"What!" he
exclaimed, to Lucien's utter bewilderment. "Do you dare to come here,
sir? Your patent was made out, but his lordship has torn it up. Here it
is!" (the Secretary-General caught up the first torn sheet that came to
hand). "The Minister wished to discover the author of yesterday's
atrocious article, and here is the manuscript," added the speaker,
holding out the sheets of Lucien's article. "You call yourself a
Royalist, sir, and you are on the staff of that detestable paper which
turns the Minister's hair gray, harasses the Centre, and is dragging
the country headlong to ruin? You breakfast on the _Corsair_, the
_Miroir_, the _Constitutionnel_, and the _Courier_; you dine on the
_Quotidienne_ and the _Reveil_, and then sup with Martainville, the
worst enemy of the Government! Martainville urges the Government on to
Absolutist measures; he is more likely to bring on another Revolution
than if he had gone over to the extreme Left. You are a very clever
journalist, but you will never make a politician. The Minister
denounced you to the King, and the King was so angry that he scolded M.
le Duc de Navarreins, his First Gentleman of the Bedchamber. Your
enemies will be all the more formidable because they have hitherto been
your friends. Conduct that one expects from an enemy is atrocious in a
friend."

"Why, really, my dear fellow, are you a child?" said
des Lupeaulx. "You have compromised me. Mme. d'Espard, Mme. de
Bargeton, and Mme. de Montcornet, who were responsible for you, must be
furious. The Duke is sure to have handed on his annoyance to the
Marquise, and the Marquise will have scolded her cousin. Keep away from
them and wait."

"Here comes his lordship--go!" said the Secretary-General.

Lucien
went out into the Place Vendome; he was stunned by this bludgeon blow.
He walked home along the Boulevards trying to think over his position.
He saw himself a plaything in the hands of envy, treachery, and greed.
What was he in this world of contending ambitions? A child sacrificing
everything to the pursuit of pleasure and the gratification of vanity;
a poet whose thoughts never went beyond the moment, a moth flitting
from one bright gleaming object to another. He had no definite aim; he
was the slave of circumstance --meaning well, doing ill. Conscience
tortured him remorselessly. And to crown it all, he was penniless and
exhausted with work and emotion. His articles could not compare with
Merlin's or Nathan's work.

He walked at random, absorbed in
these thoughts. As he passed some of the reading-rooms which were
already lending books as well as newspapers, a placard caught his eyes.
It was an advertisement of a book with a grotesque title, but beneath
the announcement he saw his name in brilliant letters--"By Lucien
Chardon de Rubempre." So his book had come out, and he had heard
nothing of it! All the newspapers were silent. He stood motionless
before the placard, his arms hanging at his sides. He did not notice a
little knot of acquaintances --Rastignac and de Marsay and some other
fashionable young men; nor did he see that Michel Chrestien and Leon
Giraud were coming towards him.

"Are you M. Chardon?" It was
Michel who spoke, and there was that in the sound of his voice that set
Lucien's heartstrings vibrating.

"Do you not know me?" he asked, turning very pale.

Michel spat in his face.

"Take
that as your wages for your article against d'Arthez. If everybody
would do as I do on his own or his friend's behalf, the press would be
as it ought to be--a self-respecting and respected priesthood."

Lucien staggered back and caught hold of Rastignac.

"Gentlemen,"
he said, addressing Rastignac and de Marsay, "you will not refuse to
act as my seconds. But first, I wish to make matters even and apology
impossible."

He struck Michel a sudden, unexpected blow in the
face. The rest rushed in between the Republican and Royalist, to
prevent a street brawl. Rastignac dragged Lucien off to the Rue
Taitbout, only a few steps away from the Boulevard de Gand, where this
scene took place. It was the hour of dinner, or a crowd would have
assembled at once. De Marsay came to find Lucien, and the pair insisted
that he should dine with them at the Cafe Anglais, where they drank and
made merry.

"Are you a good swordsman?" inquired de Marsay.

"I have never had a foil in my hands."

"A good shot?"

"Never fired a pistol in my life."

"Then you have luck on your side. You are a formidable antagonist to
stand up to; you may kill your man," said de Marsay.

Fortunately, Lucien found Coralie in bed and asleep.

She
had played without rehearsal in a one-act play, and taken her revenge.
She had met with genuine applause. Her enemies had not been prepared
for this step on her part, and her success had determined the manager
to give her the heroine's part in Camille Maupin's play. He had
discovered the cause of her apparent failure, and was indignant with
Florine and Nathan. Coralie should have the protection of the
management.

At five o'clock that morning, Rastignac came for Lucien.

"The
name of your street my dear fellow, is particularly appropriate for
your lodgings; you are up in the sky," he said, by way of greeting.
"Let us be first upon the ground on the road to Clignancourt; it is
good form, and we ought to set them an example."

"Here is the
programme," said de Marsay, as the cab rattled through the Faubourg
Saint-Denis: "You stand up at twenty-five paces, coming nearer, till
you are only fifteen apart. You have, each of you, five paces to take
and three shots to fire--no more. Whatever happens, that must be the
end of it. We load for your antagonist, and his seconds load for you.
The weapons were chosen by the four seconds at a gunmaker's. We helped
you to a chance, I will promise you; horse pistols are to be the
weapons."

For Lucien, life had become a bad dream. He did not
care whether he lived or died. The courage of suicide helped him in
some sort to carry things off with a dash of bravado before the
spectators. He stood in his place; he would not take a step, a piece of
recklessness which the others took for deliberate calculation. They
thought the poet an uncommonly cool hand. Michel Chrestien came as far
as his limit; both fired twice and at the same time, for either party
was considered to be equally insulted. Michel's first bullet grazed
Lucien's chin; Lucien's passed ten feet above Chrestien's head. The
second shot hit Lucien's coat collar, but the buckram lining
fortunately saved its wearer. The third bullet struck him in the chest,
and he dropped.

"Is he dead?" asked Michel Chrestien.

"No," said the surgeon, "he will pull through."

"So much the worse," answered Michel.

"Yes; so much the worse," said Lucien, as his tears fell fast.

By
noon the unhappy boy lay in bed in his own room. With untold pains they
had managed to remove him, but it had taken five hours to bring him to
the Rue de la Lune. His condition was not dangerous, but precautions
were necessary lest fever should set in and bring about troublesome
complications. Coralie choked down her grief and anguish. She sat up
with him at night through the anxious weeks of his illness, studying
her parts by his bedside. Lucien was in danger for two long months; and
often at the theatre Coralie acted her frivolous role with one thought
in her heart, "Perhaps he is dying at this moment."

Lucien owed
his life to the skill and devotion of a friend whom he had grievously
hurt. Bianchon had come to tend him after hearing the story of the
attack from d'Arthez, who told it in confidence, and excused the
unhappy poet. Bianchon suspected that d'Arthez was generously trying to
screen the renegade; but on questioning Lucien during a lucid interval
in the dangerous nervous fever, he learned that his patient was only
responsible for the one serious article in Hector Merlin's paper.

Before
the first month was out, the firm of Fendant and Cavalier filed their
schedule. Bianchon told Coralie that Lucien must on no account hear the
news. The famous _Archer of Charles IX._, brought out with an absurd
title, had been a complete failure. Fendant, being anxious to realize a
little ready money before going into bankruptcy, had sold the whole
edition (without Cavalier's knowledge) to dealers in printed paper.
These, in their turn, had disposed of it at a cheap rate to hawkers,
and Lucien's book at that moment was adorning the bookstalls along the
Quays. The booksellers on the Quai des Augustins, who had previously
taken a quantity of copies, now discovered that after this sudden
reduction of the price they were like to lose heavily on their
purchases; the four duodecimo volumes, for which they had paid four
francs fifty centimes, were being given away for fifty sous. Great was
the outcry in the trade; but the newspapers preserved a profound
silence. Barbet had not foreseen this "clearance;" he had a belief in
Lucien's abilities; for once he had broken his rule and taken two
hundred copies. The prospect of a loss drove him frantic; the things he
said of Lucien were fearful to hear. Then Barbet took a heroic
resolution. He stocked his copies in a corner of his shop, with the
obstinacy of greed, and left his competitors to sell their wares at a
loss. Two years afterwards, when d'Arthez's fine preface, the merits of
the book, and one or two articles by Leon Giraud had raised the value
of the book, Barbet sold his copies, one by one, at ten francs each.

Lucien
knew nothing of all this, but Berenice and Coralie could not refuse to
allow Hector Merlin to see his dying comrade, and Hector Merlin made
him drink, drop by drop, the whole of the bitter draught brewed by the
failure of Fendant and Cavalier, made bankrupts by his first ill-fated
book. Martainville, the one friend who stood by Lucien through thick
and thin, had written a magnificent article on his work; but so great
was the general exasperation against the editor of _L'Aristarque_,
_L'Oriflamme_, and _Le Drapeau Blanc_, that his championship only
injured Lucien. In vain did the athlete return the Liberal insults
tenfold, not a newspaper took up the challenge in spite of all his
attacks.

Coralie, Berenice, and Bianchon might shut the door on
Lucien's so-called friends, who raised a great outcry, but it was
impossible to keep out creditors and writs. After the failure of
Fendant and Cavalier, their bills were taken into bankruptcy according
to that provision of the Code of Commerce most inimical to the claims
of third parties, who in this way lose the benefit of delay.

Lucien
discovered that Camusot was proceeding against him with great energy.
When Coralie heard the name, and for the first time learned the
dreadful and humiliating step which her poet had taken for her sake,
the angelic creature loved him ten times more than before, and would
not approach Camusot. The bailiff bringing the warrant of arrest shrank
back from the idea of dragging his prisoner out of bed, and went back
to Camusot before applying to the President of the Tribunal of Commerce
for an order to remove the debtor to a private hospital. Camusot
hurried at once to the Rue de la Lune, and Coralie went down to him.

When
she came up again she held the warrants, in which Lucien was described
as a tradesman, in her hand. How had she obtained those papers from
Camusot? What promise had she given? Coralie kept a sad, gloomy
silence, but when she returned she looked as if all the life had gone
out of her. She played in Camille Maupin's play, and contributed not a
little to the success of that illustrious literary hermaphrodite; but
the creation of this character was the last flicker of a bright, dying
lamp. On the twentieth night, when Lucien had so far recovered that he
had regained his appetite and could walk abroad, and talked of getting
to work again, Coralie broke down; a secret trouble was weighing upon
her. Berenice always believed that she had promised to go back to
Camusot to save Lucien.

Another mortification followed. Coralie
was obliged to see her part given to Florine. Nathan had threatened the
Gymnase with war if the management refused to give the vacant place to
Coralie's rival. Coralie had persisted till she could play no longer,
knowing that Florine was waiting to step into her place. She had
overtasked her strength. The Gymnase had advanced sums during Lucien's
illness, she had no money to draw; Lucien, eager to work though he was,
was not yet strong enough to write, and he helped besides to nurse
Coralie and to relieve Berenice. From poverty they had come to utter
distress; but in Bianchon they found a skilful and devoted doctor, who
obtained credit for them of the druggist. The landlord of the house and
the tradespeople knew by this time how matters stood. The furniture was
attached. The tailor and dressmaker no longer stood in awe of the
journalist, and proceeded to extremes; and at last no one, with the
exception of the pork-butcher and the druggist, gave the two unlucky
children credit. For a week or more all three of them--Lucien,
Berenice, and the invalid--were obliged to live on the various
ingenious preparations sold by the pork-butcher; the inflammatory diet
was little suited to the sick girl, and Coralie grew worse. Sheer want
compelled Lucien to ask Lousteau for a return of the loan of a thousand
francs lost at play by the friend who had deserted him in his hour of
need. Perhaps, amid all his troubles, this step cost him most cruel
suffering.

Lousteau was not to be found in the Rue de la Harpe.
Hunted down like a hare, he was lodging now with this friend, now with
that. Lucien found him at last at Flicoteaux's; he was sitting at the
very table at which Lucien had found him that evening when, for his
misfortune, he forsook d'Arthez for journalism. Lousteau offered him
dinner, and Lucien accepted the offer.

As they came out of
Flicoteaux's with Claude Vignon (who happened to be dining there that
day) and the great man in obscurity, who kept his wardrobe at
Samanon's, the four among them could not produce enough specie to pay
for a cup of coffee at the Cafe Voltaire. They lounged about the
Luxembourg in the hope of meeting with a publisher; and, as it fell
out, they met with one of the most famous printers of the day. Lousteau
borrowed forty francs of him, and divided the money into four equal
parts.

Misery had brought down Lucien's pride and extinguished
sentiment; he shed tears as he told the story of his troubles, but each
one of his comrades had a tale as cruel as his own; and when the three
versions had been given, it seemed to the poet that he was the least
unfortunate among the four. All of them craved a respite from
remembrance and thoughts which made trouble doubly hard to bear.

Lousteau
hurried to the Palais Royal to gamble with his remaining nine francs.
The great man unknown to fame, though he had a divine mistress, must
needs hie him to a low haunt of vice to wallow in perilous pleasure.
Vignon betook himself to the _Rocher de Cancale_ to drown memory and
thought in a couple of bottles of Bordeaux; Lucien parted company with
him on the threshold, declining to share that supper. When he shook
hands with the one journalist who had not been hostile to him, it was
with a cruel pang in his heart.

"What shall I do?" he asked aloud.

"One
must do as one can," the great critic said. "Your book is good, but it
excited jealousy, and your struggle will be hard and long. Genius is a
cruel disease. Every writer carries a canker in his heart, a devouring
monster, like the tapeworm in the stomach, which destroys all feeling
as it arises in him. Which is the stronger? The man or the disease? One
has need be a great man, truly, to keep the balance between genius and
character. The talent grows, the heart withers. Unless a man is a
giant, unless he has the thews of a Hercules, he must be content either
to lose his gift or to live without a heart. You are slender and
fragile, you will give way," he added, as he turned into the restaurant.

Lucien
returned home, thinking over that terrible verdict. He beheld the life
of literature by the light of the profound truths uttered by Vignon.

"Money! money!" a voice cried in his ears.

Then
he drew three bills of a thousand francs each, due respectively in one,
two, and three months, imitating the handwriting of his brother-in-law,
David Sechard, with admirable skill. He endorsed the bills, and took
them next morning to Metivier, the paper-dealer in the Rue Serpente,
who made no difficulty about taking them. Lucien wrote a few lines to
give his brother-in-law notice of this assault upon his cash-box,
promising, as usual in such cases, to be ready to meet the bills as
they fell due.

When all debts, his own and Coralie's, were paid,
he put the three hundred francs which remained into Berenice's hands,
bidding her to refuse him money if he asked her for it. He was afraid
of a return of the gambler's frenzy. Lucien worked away gloomily in a
sort of cold, speechless fury, putting forth all his powers into witty
articles, written by the light of the lamp at Coralie's bedside.
Whenever he looked up in search of ideas, his eyes fell on that beloved
face, white as porcelain, fair with the beauty that belongs to the
dying, and he saw a smile on her pale lips, and her eyes, grown bright
with a more consuming pain than physical suffering, always turned on
his face.

Lucien sent in his work, but he could not leave the
house to worry editors, and his articles did not appear. When he at
last made up his mind to go to the office, he met with a cool reception
from Theodore Gaillard, who had advanced him money, and turned his
literary diamonds to good account afterwards.

"That
little Lucien has written himself out with his romance and his first
articles," cried Felicien Vernou, Merlin, and the whole chorus of his
enemies, whenever his name came up at Dauriat's or the Vaudeville. "The
work he is sending us is pitiable."

"To have written oneself
out" (in the slang of journalism), is a verdict very hard to live down.
It passed everywhere from mouth to mouth, ruining Lucien, all
unsuspicious as he was. And, indeed, his burdens were too heavy for his
strength. In the midst of a heavy strain of work, he was sued for the
bills which he had drawn in David Sechard's name. He had recourse to
Camusot's experience, and Coralie's sometime adorer was generous enough
to assist the man she loved. The intolerable situation lasted for two
whole months; the days being diversified by stamped papers handed over
to Desroches, a friend of Bixiou, Blondet, and des Lupeaulx.

Early
in August, Bianchon told them that Coralie's condition was
hopeless--she had only a few days to live. Those days were spent in
tears by Berenice and Lucien; they could not hide their grief from the
dying girl, and she was broken-hearted for Lucien's sake.

Some
strange change was working in Coralie. She would have Lucien bring a
priest; she must be reconciled to the Church and die in peace. Coralie
died as a Christian; her repentance was sincere. Her agony and death
took all energy and heart out of Lucien. He sank into a low chair at
the foot of the bed, and never took his eyes off her till Death brought
the end of her suffering. It was five o'clock in the morning. Some
singing-bird lighting upon a flower-pot on the window-sill, twittered a
few notes. Berenice, kneeling by the bedside, was covering a hand fast
growing cold with kisses and tears. On the chimney-piece there lay
eleven sous.

Lucien went out. Despair made him beg for money to
lay Coralie in her grave. He had wild thoughts of flinging himself at
the Marquise d'Espard's feet, of entreating the Comte du Chatelet, Mme.
de Bargeton, Mlle. des Touches, nay, that terrible dandy of a de
Marsay. All his pride had gone with his strength. He would have
enlisted as a common soldier at that moment for money. He walked on
with a slouching, feverish gait known to all the unhappy, reached
Camille Maupin's house, entered, careless of his disordered dress, and
sent in a message. He entreated Mlle. des Touches to see him for a
moment.

"Mademoiselle only went to bed at three o'clock this
morning," said the servant, "and no one would dare to disturb her until
she rings."

"When does she ring?"

"Never before ten o'clock."

Then
Lucien wrote one of those harrowing appeals in which the well-dressed
beggar flings all pride and self-respect to the winds. One evening, not
so very long ago, when Lousteau had told him of the abject begging
letters which Finot received, Lucien had thought it impossible that any
creature would sink so low; and now, carried away by his pen, he had
gone further, it may be, than other unlucky wretches upon the same
road. He did not suspect, in his fever and imbecility, that he had just
written a masterpiece of pathos. On his way home along the Boulevards,
he met Barbet.

"Barbet!" he begged, holding out his hand. "Five hundred francs!"

"No. Two hundred," returned the other.

"Ah! then you have a heart."

"Yes;
but I am a man of business as well. I have lost a lot of money through
you," he concluded, after giving the history of the failure of Fendant
and Cavalier, "will you put me in the way of making some?"

Lucien quivered.

"You
are a poet. You ought to understand all kinds of poetry," continued the
little publisher. "I want a few rollicking songs at this moment to put
along with some more by different authors, or they will be down upon me
over the copyright. I want to have a good collection to sell on the
streets at ten sous. If you care to let me have ten good drinking-songs
by to-morrow morning, or something spicy,--you know the sort of thing,
eh!--I will pay you two hundred francs."

When Lucien returned
home, he found Coralie stretched out straight and stiff on a
pallet-bed; Berenice, with many tears, had wrapped her in a coarse
linen sheet, and put lighted candles at the four corners of the bed.
Coralie's face had taken that strange, delicate beauty of death which
so vividly impresses the living with the idea of absolute calm; she
looked like some white girl in a decline; it seemed as if those pale,
crimson lips must open and murmur the name which had blended with the
name of God in the last words that she uttered before she died.

Lucien
told Berenice to order a funeral which should not cost more than two
hundred francs, including the service at the shabby little church of
the Bonne-Nouvelle. As soon as she had gone out, he sat down to a
table, and beside the dead body of his love he composed ten rollicking
songs to fit popular airs. The effort cost him untold anguish, but at
last the brain began to work at the bidding of Necessity, as if
suffering were not; and already Lucien had learned to put Claude
Vignon's terrible maxims in practice, and to raise a barrier between
heart and brain. What a night the poor boy spent over those drinking
songs, writing by the light of the tall wax candles while the priest
recited the prayers for the dead!

Morning broke before the last
song was finished. Lucien tried it over to a street-song of the day, to
the consternation of Berenice and the priest, who thought that he was
mad:--

Lads, 'tis tedious waste of time To mingle song and
reason; Folly calls for laughing rhyme, Sense is out of season. Let
Apollo be forgot When Bacchus fills the drinking-cup; Any catch is
good, I wot, If good fellows take it up. Let philosophers protest, Let
us laugh, And quaff, And a fig for the rest!

As Hippocrates has
said, Every jolly fellow, When a century has sped, Still is fit and
mellow. No more following of a lass With the palsy in your legs?
--While your hand can hold a glass, You can drain it to the dregs, With
an undiminished zest. Let us laugh, And quaff, And a fig for the rest!

Whence we come we know full well. Whiter are we going? Ne'er a one of
us can tell, 'Tis a thing past knowing. Faith! what does it signify,
Take the good that Heaven sends; It is certain that we die, Certain
that we live, my friends. Life is nothing but a jest. Let us laugh, And
quaff, And a fig for the rest!

He was shouting the reckless
refrain when d'Arthez and Bianchon arrived, to find him in a paroxysm
of despair and exhaustion, utterly unable to make a fair copy of his
verses. A torrent of tears followed; and when, amid his sobs, he had
told his story, he saw the tears standing in his friends' eyes.

"This wipes out many sins," said d'Arthez.

"Happy are they who suffer for their sins in this world," the priest
said solemnly.

At
the sight of the fair, dead face smiling at Eternity, while Coralie's
lover wrote tavern-catches to buy a grave for her, and Barbet paid for
the coffin--of the four candles lighted about the dead body of her who
had thrilled a great audience as she stood behind the footlights in her
Spanish basquina and scarlet green-clocked stockings; while beyond in
the doorway, stood the priest who had reconciled the dying actress with
God, now about to return to the church to say a mass for the soul of
her who had "loved much,"--all the grandeur and the sordid aspects of
the scene, all that sorrow crushed under by Necessity, froze the blood
of the great writer and the great doctor. They sat down; neither of
them could utter a word.

Just at that moment a servant in livery
announced Mlle. des Touches. That beautiful and noble woman understood
everything at once. She stepped quickly across the room to Lucien, and
slipped two thousand-franc notes into his hand as she grasped it.

"It is too late," he said, looking up at her with dull, hopeless eyes.

The
three stayed with Lucien, trying to soothe his despair with comforting
words; but every spring seemed to be broken. At noon all the
brotherhood, with the exception of Michel Chrestien (who, however, had
learned the truth as to Lucien's treachery), was assembled in the poor
little church of the Bonne-Nouvelle; Mlle. de Touches was present, and
Berenice and Coralie's dresser from the theatre, with a couple of
supernumeraries and the disconsolate Camusot. All the men accompanied
the actress to her last resting-place in Pere Lachaise. Camusot,
shedding hot tears, had solemnly promised Lucien to buy the grave in
perpetuity, and to put a headstone above it with the words:

CORALIE

AGED NINETEEN YEARS

August, 1822

Lucien stayed there, on the sloping ground that looks out over Paris,
until the sun had set.

"Who
will love me now?" he thought. "My truest friends despise me. Whatever
I might have done, she who lies here would have thought me wholly noble
and good. I have no one left to me now but my sister and mother and
David. And what do they think of me at home?"

Poor distinguished
provincial! He went back to the Rue de la Lune; but the sight of the
rooms was so acutely painful, that he could not stay in them, and he
took a cheap lodging elsewhere in the same street. Mlle. des Touches'
two thousand francs and the sale of the furniture paid the debts.

Berenice
had two hundred francs left, on which they lived for two months. Lucien
was prostrate; he could neither write nor think; he gave way to morbid
grief. Berenice took pity upon him.

"Suppose that you were to go
back to your own country, how are you to get there?" she asked one day,
by way of reply to an exclamation of Lucien's.

"On foot."

"But even so, you must live and sleep on the way. Even if you walk
twelve leagues a day, you will want twenty francs at least."

"I will get them together," he said.

He
took his clothes and his best linen, keeping nothing but strict
necessaries, and went to Samanon, who offered fifty francs for his
entire wardrobe. In vain he begged the money-lender to let him have
enough to pay his fare by the coach; Samanon was inexorable. In a
paroxysm of fury, Lucien rushed to Frascati's, staked the proceeds of
the sale, and lost every farthing. Back once more in the wretched room
in the Rue de la Lune, he asked Berenice for Coralie's shawl. The good
girl looked at him, and knew in a moment what he meant to do. He had
confessed to his loss at the gaming-table; and now he was going to hang
himself.

"Are you mad, sir? Go out for a walk, and come back
again at midnight. I will get the money for you; but keep to the
Boulevards, do not go towards the Quais."

Lucien paced up and
down the Boulevards. He was stupid with grief. He watched the
passers-by and the stream of traffic, and felt that he was alone, and a
very small atom in this seething whirlpool of Paris, churned by the
strife of innumerable interests. His thoughts went back to the banks of
his Charente; a craving for happiness and home awoke in him; and with
the craving, came one of the sudden febrile bursts of energy which
half-feminine natures like his mistake for strength. He would not give
up until he had poured out his heart to David Sechard, and taken
counsel of the three good angels still left to him on earth.

As
he lounged along, he caught sight of Berenice--Berenice in her Sunday
clothes, speaking to a stranger at the corner of the Rue de la Lune and
the filthy Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, where she had taken her stand.

"What are you doing?" asked Lucien, dismayed by a sudden suspicion.

"Here
are your twenty francs," said the girl, slipping four five-franc pieces
into the poet's hand. "They may cost dear yet; but you can go," and she
had fled before Lucien could see the way she went; for, in justice to
him, it must be said that the money burned his hand, he wanted to
return it, but he was forced to keep it as the final brand set upon him
by life in Paris.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Barbet A Man of Business The Seamy Side of History The Middle Classes

Beaudenord, Godefroid de The Ball at Sceaux The Firm of Nucingen

Berenice Lost Illusions

Bianchon,
Horace Father Goriot The Atheist's Mass Cesar Birotteau The Commission
in Lunacy Lost Illusions A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a
Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a
Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A
Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the
Department The Imaginary Mistress The Middle Classes Cousin Betty The
Country Parson In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following: Another
Study of Woman La Grande Breteche

Blondet, Emile Jealousies of a
Country Town Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Modeste Mignon Another
Study of Woman The Secrets of a Princess A Daughter of Eve The Firm of
Nucingen The Peasantry

Blondet, Virginie Jealousies of a Country
Town The Secrets of a Princess The Peasantry Another Study of Woman The
Member for Arcis A Daughter of Eve

Braulard Cousin Betty Cousin Pons

Bridau,
Joseph The Purse A Bachelor's Establishment A Start in Life Modeste
Mignon Another Study of Woman Pierre Grassou Letters of Two Brides
Cousin Betty The Member for Arcis

Bruel, Jean Francois du A
Bachelor's Establishment The Government Clerks A Start in Life A Prince
of Bohemia The Middle Classes A Daughter of Eve

Bruel, Claudine
Chaffaroux, Madame du A Bachelor's Establishment A Prince of Bohemia
Letters of Two Brides The Middle Classes

Cabirolle, Agathe-Florentine A Start in Life Lost Illusions A
Bachelor's Establishment

Camusot
A Bachelor's Establishment Cousin Pons The Muse of the Department Cesar
Birotteau At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

Canalis,
Constant-Cyr-Melchior, Baron de Letters of Two Brides Modeste Mignon
The Magic Skin Another Study of Woman A Start in Life Beatrix The
Unconscious Humorists The Member for Arcis

Cardot, Jean-Jerome-Severin A Start in Life Lost Illusions

A Bachelor's Establishment At the Sign of the Cat and Racket Cesar
Birotteau

Carigliano, Duchesse de At the Sign of the Cat and Racket The Peasantry
The Member for Arcis

Cavalier The Seamy Side of History

Chaboisseau The Government Clerks A Man of Business

Chatelet, Sixte, Baron du Lost Illusions Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
The Thirteen

Chatelet, Marie-Louise-Anais de Negrepelisse, Baronne du Lost Illusions
The Government Clerks

Chrestien, Michel A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess

Collin, Jacques Father Goriot Lost Illusions Scenes from a Courtesan's
Life The Member for Arcis

Coloquinte A Bachelor's Establishment

Coralie, Mademoiselle A Start in Life A Bachelor's Establishment

Dauriat Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Modeste Mignon

Desroches
(son) A Bachelor's Establishment Colonel Chabert A Start in Life A
Woman of Thirty The Commission in Lunacy The Government Clerks Scenes
from a Courtesan's Life The Firm of Nucingen A Man of Business The
Middle Classes

Arthez, Daniel d' Letters of Two Brides The Member for Arcis The
Secrets of a Princess

Espard,
Jeanne-Clementine-Athenais de Blamont-Chauvry, Marquise d' The
Commission in Lunacy Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Letters of Two
Brides Another Study of Woman The Gondreville Mystery The Secrets of a
Princess A Daughter of Eve Beatrix

Finot, Andoche Cesar
Birotteau A Bachelor's Establishment Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The
Government Clerks A Start in Life Gaudissart the Great The Firm of
Nucingen

Foy, Maximilien-Sebastien Cesar Birotteau

Gaillard, Theodore Beatrix Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The
Unconscious Humorists

Gaillard,
Madame Theodore Jealousies of a Country Town A Bachelor's Establishment
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Beatrix The Unconscious Humorists

Galathionne,
Prince and Princess (both not in each story) The Secrets of a Princess
The Middle Classes Father Goriot A Daughter of Eve Beatrix

Gentil Lost Illusions

Giraud, Leon A Bachelor's Establishment The Secrets of a Princess The
Unconscious Humorists

Giroudeau A Start in Life A Bachelor's Establishment

Grindot
Cesar Birotteau Lost Illusions A Start in Life Scenes from a
Courtesan's Life Beatrix The Middle Classes Cousin Betty

Lambert, Louis Louis Lambert A Seaside Tragedy

Listomere, Marquis de The Lily of the Valley A Study of Woman

Listomere, Marquise de The Lily of the Valley Lost Illusions A Study of
Woman A Daughter of Eve

Lousteau,
Etienne A Bachelor's Establishment Scenes from a Courtesan's Life A
Daughter of Eve Beatrix The Muse of the Department Cousin Betty A
Prince of Bohemia A Man of Business The Middle Classes The Unconscious
Humorists

Lupeaulx, Clement Chardin des The Muse of the
Department Eugenie Grandet A Bachelor's Establishment The Government
Clerks Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Ursule Mirouet

Manerville, Paul Francois-Joseph, Comte de The Thirteen The Ball at
Sceaux Lost Illusions A Marriage Settlement

Marsay,
Henri de The Thirteen The Unconscious Humorists Another Study of Woman
The Lily of the Valley Father Goriot Jealousies of a Country Town
Ursule Mirouet A Marriage Settlement Lost Illusions Letters of Two
Brides The Ball at Sceaux Modeste Mignon The Secrets of a Princess The
Gondreville Mystery A Daughter of Eve

Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Peasantry A Man of Business Cousin
Betty

Montriveau,
General Marquis Armand de The Thirteen Father Goriot Lost Illusions
Another Study of Woman Pierrette The Member for Arcis

Nathan,
Raoul Lost Illusions Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Secrets of a
Princess A Daughter of Eve Letters of Two Brides The Seamy Side of
History The Muse of the Department A Prince of Bohemia A Man of
Business The Unconscious Humorists

Nathan, Madame Raoul The Muse
of the Department Lost Illusions Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The
Government Clerks A Bachelor's Establishment Ursule Mirouet Eugenie
Grandet The Imaginary Mistress A Prince of Bohemia

Negrepelisse, De The Commission in Lunacy Lost Illusions

Nucingen,
Baron Frederic de The Firm of Nucingen Father Goriot Pierrette Cesar
Birotteau Lost Illusions Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Another Study
of Woman The Secrets of a Princess A Man of Business Cousin Betty The
Muse of the Department The Unconscious Humorists

Nucingen,
Baronne Delphine de Father Goriot The Thirteen Eugenie Grandet Cesar
Birotteau Melmoth Reconciled Lost Illusions The Commission in Lunacy
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Modeste Mignon The Firm of Nucingen
Another Study of Woman A Daughter of Eve The Member for Arcis

Palma (banker) The Firm of Nucingen Cesar Birotteau Gobseck Lost
Illusions The Ball at Sceaux

Pombreton, Marquis de Lost Illusions Jealousies of a Country Town

Rastignac,
Eugene de Father Goriot Scenes from a Courtesan's Life The Ball at
Sceaux The Commission in Lunacy A Study of Woman Another Study of Woman
The Magic Skin The Secrets of a Princess A Daughter of Eve The
Gondreville Mystery The Firm of Nucingen Cousin Betty The Member for
Arcis The Unconscious Humorists

Rhetore, Duc Alphonse de A Bachelor's Establishment

Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Letters of Two Brides Albert Savarus The
Member for Arcis

Ridal, Fulgence A Bachelor's Establishment The Unconscious Humorists

Rubempre, Lucien-Chardon de Lost Illusions The Government Clerks Ursule
Mirouet Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Samanon The Government Clerks A Man of Business Cousin Betty

Sechard, David Lost Illusions Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Sechard, Madame David Lost Illusions Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Tillet,
Ferdinand du Cesar Birotteau The Firm of Nucingen The Middle Classes A
Bachelor's Establishment Pierrette Melmoth Reconciled The Secrets of a
Princess A Daughter of Eve The Member for Arcis Cousin Betty The
Unconscious Humorists

Touches, Mademoiselle Felicite des Beatrix
Lost Illusions A Bachelor's Establishment Another Study of Woman A
Daughter of Eve Honorine Beatrix The Muse of the Department

Vandenesse,
Comte Felix de The Lily of the Valley Lost Illusions Cesar Birotteau
Letters of Two Brides A Start in Life The Marriage Settlement The
Secrets of a Princess Another Study of Woman The Gondreville Mystery A
Daughter of Eve

Vernou, Felicien A Bachelor's Establishment Lost
Illusions Scenes from a Courtesan's Life A Daughter of Eve Cousin Betty

Lucien
had gone to Paris; and David Sechard, with the courage and intelligence
of the ox which painters give the Evangelist for accompanying symbol,
set himself to make the large fortune for which he had wished that
evening down by the Charente, when he sat with Eve by the weir, and she
gave him her hand and her heart. He wanted to make the money quickly,
and less for himself than for Eve's sake and Lucien's. He would place
his wife amid the elegant and comfortable surroundings that were hers
by right, and his strong arm should sustain her brother's
ambitions--this was the programme that he saw before his eyes in
letters of fire.

Journalism and politics, the immense
development of the book trade, of literature and of the sciences; the
increase of public interest in matters touching the various industries
in the country; in fact, the whole social tendency of the epoch
following the establishment of the Restoration produced an enormous
increase in the demand for paper. The supply required was almost ten
times as large as the quantity in which the celebrated Ouvrard
speculated at the outset of the Revolution. Then Ouvrard could buy up
first the entire stock of paper and then the manufacturers; but in the
year 1821 there were so many paper-mills in France, that no one could
hope to repeat his success; and David had neither audacity enough nor
capital enough for such speculation. Machinery for producing paper in
any length was just coming into use in England. It was one of the most
urgent needs of the time, therefore, that the paper trade should keep
pace with the requirements of the French system of civil government, a
system by which the right of discussion was to be extended to every
man, and the whole fabric based upon continual expression of individual
opinion; a grave misfortune, for the nation that deliberates is but
little wont to act.

So, strange coincidence! while Lucien was
drawn into the great machinery of journalism, where he was like to
leave his honor and his intelligence torn to shreds, David Sechard, at
the back of his printing-house, foresaw all the practical consequences
of the increased activity of the periodical press. He saw the direction
in which the spirit of the age was tending, and sought to find means to
the required end. He saw also that there was a fortune awaiting the
discoverer of cheap paper, and the event has justified his
clearsightedness. Within the last fifteen years, the Patent Office has
received more than a hundred applications from persons claiming to have
discovered cheap substances to be employed in the manufacture of paper.
David felt more than ever convinced that this would be no brilliant
triumph, it is true, but a useful and immensely profitable discovery;
and after his brother-in-law went to Paris, he became more and more
absorbed in the problem which he had set himself to solve.

The
expenses of his marriage and of Lucien's journey to Paris had exhausted
all his resources; he confronted the extreme of poverty at the very
outset of married life. He had kept one thousand francs for the working
expenses of the business, and owed a like sum, for which he had given a
bill to Postel the druggist. So here was a double problem for this deep
thinker; he must invent a method of making cheap paper, and that
quickly; he must make the discovery, in fact, in order to apply the
proceeds to the needs of the household and of the business. What words
can describe the brain that can forget the cruel preoccupations caused
by hidden want, by the daily needs of a family and the daily drudgery
of a printer's business, which requires such minute, painstaking care;
and soar, with the enthusiasm and intoxication of the man of science,
into the regions of the unknown in quest of a secret which daily eludes
the most subtle experiment? And the inventor, alas! as will shortly be
seen, has plenty of woes to endure, besides the ingratitude of the
many; idle folk that can do nothing themselves tell them, "Such a one
is a born inventor; he could not do otherwise. He no more deserves
credit for his invention than a prince for being born to rule! He is
simply exercising his natural faculties, and his work is its own
reward," and the people believe them.

Marriage brings profound
mental and physical perturbations into a girl's life; and if she
marries under the ordinary conditions of lower middle-class life, she
must moreover begin to study totally new interests and initiate herself
in the intricacies of business. With marriage, therefore, she enters
upon a phase of her existence when she is necessarily on the watch
before she can act. Unfortunately, David's love for his wife retarded
this training; he dared not tell her the real state of affairs on the
day after their wedding, nor for some time afterwards. His father's
avarice condemned him to the most grinding poverty, but he could not
bring himself to spoil the honeymoon by beginning his wife's commercial
education and prosaic apprenticeship to his laborious craft. So it came
to pass that housekeeping, no less than working expenses, ate up the
thousand francs, his whole fortune. For four months David gave no
thought to the future, and his wife remained in ignorance. The
awakening was terrible! Postel's bill fell due; there was no money to
meet it, and Eve knew enough of the debt and its cause to give up her
bridal trinkets and silver.

That evening Eve tried to induce
David to talk of their affairs, for she had noticed that he was giving
less attention to the business and more to the problem of which he had
once spoken to her. Since the first few weeks of married life, in fact,
David spent most of his time in the shed in the backyard, in the little
room where he was wont to mould his ink-rollers. Three months after his
return to Angouleme, he had replaced the old fashioned round ink-balls
by rollers made of strong glue and treacle, and an ink-table, on which
the ink was evenly distributed, an improvement so obvious that Cointet
Brothers no sooner saw it than they adopted the plan themselves.

By
the partition wall of this kitchen, as it were, David had set up a
little furnace with a copper pan, ostensibly to save the cost of fuel
over the recasting of his rollers, though the moulds had not been used
twice, and hung there rusting upon the wall. Nor was this all; a solid
oak door had been put in by his orders, and the walls were lined with
sheet-iron; he even replaced the dirty window sash by panes of ribbed
glass, so that no one without could watch him at his work.

When
Eve began to speak about the future, he looked uneasily at her, and cut
her short at the first word by saying, "I know all that you must think,
child, when you see that the workshop is left to itself, and that I am
dead, as it were, to all business interests; but see," he continued,
bringing her to the window, and pointing to the mysterious shed, "there
lies our fortune. For some months yet we must endure our lot, but let
us bear it patiently; leave me to solve the problem of which I told
you, and all our troubles will be at an end."

David was so good,
his devotion was so thoroughly to be taken upon his word, that the poor
wife, with a wife's anxiety as to daily expenses, determined to spare
her husband the household cares and to take the burden upon herself. So
she came down from the pretty blue-and-white room, where she sewed and
talked contentedly with her mother, took possession of one of the two
dens at the back of the printing-room, and set herself to learn the
business routine of typography. Was it not heroism in a wife who
expected ere long to be a mother?

During the past few months
David's workmen had left him one by one; there was not enough work for
them to do. Cointet Brothers, on the other hand, were overwhelmed with
orders; they were employing all the workmen of the department; the
alluring prospect of high wages even brought them a few from Bordeaux,
more especially apprentices, who thought themselves sufficiently expert
to cancel their articles and go elsewhere. When Eve came to look into
the affairs of Sechard's printing works, she discovered that he
employed three persons in all.

First in order stood Cerizet, an
apprentice of Didot's, whom David had chosen to train. Most foremen
have some one favorite among the great numbers of workers under them,
and David had brought Cerizet to Angouleme, where he had been learning
more of the business. Marion, as much attached to the house as a
watch-dog, was the second; and the third was Kolb, an Alsacien, at one
time a porter in the employ of the Messrs. Didot. Kolb had been drawn
for military service, chance brought him to Angouleme, and David
recognized the man's face at a review just as his time was about to
expire. Kolb came to see David, and was smitten forthwith by the charms
of the portly Marion; she possessed all the qualities which a man of
his class looks for in a wife--the robust health that bronzes the
cheeks, the strength of a man (Marion could lift a form of type with
ease), the scrupulous honesty on which an Alsacien sets such store, the
faithful service which bespeaks a sterling character, and finally, the
thrift which had saved a little sum of a thousand francs, besides a
stock of clothing and linen, neat and clean, as country linen can be.
Marion herself, a big, stout woman of thirty-six, felt sufficiently
flattered by the admiration of a cuirassier, who stood five feet seven
in his stockings, a well-built warrior, strong as a bastion, and not
unnaturally suggested that he should become a printer. So, by the time
Kolb received his full discharge, Marion and David between them had
transformed him into a tolerably creditable "bear," though their pupil
could neither read nor write.

Job printing, as it is called, was
not so abundant at this season but that Cerizet could manage it without
help. Cerizet, compositor, clicker, and foreman, realized in his person
the "phenomenal triplicity" of Kant; he set up type, read proof, took
orders, and made out invoices; but the most part of the time he had
nothing to do, and used to read novels in his den at the back of the
workshop while he waited for an order for a bill-head or a trade
circular. Marion, trained by old Sechard, prepared and wetted down the
paper, helped Kolb with the printing, hung the sheets to dry, and cut
them to size; yet cooked the dinner, none the less, and did her
marketing very early of a morning.

Eve told Cerizet to draw out
a balance-sheet for the last six months, and found that the gross
receipts amounted to eight hundred francs. On the other hand, wages at
the rate of three francs per day--two francs to Cerizet, and one to
Kolb--reached a total of six hundred francs; and as the goods supplied
for the work printed and delivered amounted to some hundred odd francs,
it was clear to Eve that David had been carrying on business at a loss
during the first half-year of their married life. There was nothing to
show for rent, nothing for Marion's wages, nor for the interest on
capital represented by the plant, the license, and the ink; nothing,
finally, by way of allowance for the host of things included in the
technical expression "wear and tear," a word which owes its origin to
the cloths and silks which are used to moderate the force of the
impression, and to save wear to the type; a square of stuff (the
_blanket_) being placed between the plat